Will Rome be a city forever?

Mario Palanti and Mole Littoria

Mario Palanti was an Italian architect who designed important buildings in the capital cities of both Argentina and Uruguay . During the period 1909-1919 he designed the Palacio Salvo in Montevideo , and produced a large number of drawings for monumental buildings that were never built. In the final period of his work, after he returned to live in Italy in 1930, he undertook a series of projects that never materialised. In the shadow of Italian Fascism, Mario Palanti saw an opportunity to transform the skyline of the Italian capital by pandering to the egotistical ambitions of a dictator. Ultimately the extent of his vision was matched only by his failure. Arriving in Italy before him, with an Argentinian Greyhound as a gift to the dictator, was his proposed design for L’Eternale, a 330metre high, 70,000sqm skyscraper of epic proportions mooted for the centre of Rome , a tower which ...

Roma Interrotta

In 1978 twelve international architects participated in the design competition for a “New Rome” based on the city’s historical center. Titled Roma Interotta (Rome Interrupted), the project assigned each architect a section Nolli ’s famous plan for Rome from 1748, from which they would develop a fictional project. The project, which was based on the distant quality of Nolli’s map that documented a condition long lost, posed a strange prompt for designs in a liminal space that did not exist. Still, many teams engaged real aspects of the city, past and present. The endeavour was meant as a criticism of the nineteenth-century urban development of Rome, when it became the capital of a united Italy. Aldo Rossi , for example, updates the Baths of Caracalla by quipping them with modern heating and cooling systems while Colin Rowe attempted to “rebuild” the Palatine Hill, using imported Roman precedents. Others, however, ignored the original Roman site altogether. Leon Krier...

The master plan for Rome

"Rome is our point of departure and reference. It is our symbol or, if you wish, our myth. We dream of a Roman Italy, that is to say wise, strong, disciplined, and imperial. Much of that which was the immortal spirit of Rome rises again in Fascism: the Fasces are Roman; our organization of combat is Roman, our pride and our courage is Roman: Civis romanus sum. It is necessary, now, that the history of tomorrow, the history we fervently wish to create, not be a contrast or a parody of the history of yesterday. The Romans were not only warriors, but formidable builders who could challenge, as they did challenge, their time." – Benito Mussolini, 1922 To create his dream of a 'Third Rome' Mussolini employed architects, archeologists and city planners to restore and rearrange the Eternal City so that it could be viewed in all of its majesty and modernity from the window of a modern automobile speeding down a newly widened street. This envolved...

Learning From Roma

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