by Roberto Dulio

Architetture di Marcello Piacentini. Le opere maestre, Mario Pisani. Con una prefazione di Sandro Benedetti Clear, Roma 2004 (pp. 148, € 29,00)

Between the two World Wars, Marcello Piacentini’s fame was very widespread. His different roles as an organizer of cultural architectural activities, a distributor of commissions and a judge of competitions stood on a par with his role as an architect. His work was well-known even beyond Italy’s national boundaries. After the war, critics belonging to the progressive fringe announced their moral and cultural disapproval of Piacentini, sanctioning his ostracization in a way that, compared to the facts, did not correspond to the reality of his functions and the professional activities that he continued to exercise until his death in 1960.

“Marcello Piacentini: morì nel 1925” (“Marcello Piacentini Died in 1925”) was the title Bruno Zevi chose for his article in L’Architettura cronache e storia (Issue 58, 1960), written the day after Piacentini’s death. With the acute critical partiality that was characteristic to him, Zevi laid the foundations for a historiographic image of Piacentini that lasted. First, he was a renovator of Italy’s taste in architecture by opening it up to exposure from France, Germany and Austria. Then, according to Zevi, after 1925, Piacentini’s work “became grandiose and acquired a bad reputation. In Italy’s history of usages, his work reflects the fascist dictatorship and is its emblem […]: a sequence of insane rhetoric and cynicism.”

The equation between Piacentini’s architecture and fascist ideology crystallized conditions that had very uncertain and contradictory borderlines, in a definitive way. Setting up a close relationship between the forms of architecture and an ideology (be it fascist or of another political or ethical nature) was exactly what Piacentini had courageously tried to avoid. Since his successful book Architettura d’oggi (Rome, 1930), his objective had been to bring mediation between avant-garde and conservative currents in architectural culture, seeking a point of equilibrium that was balanced by the different occasions upon which it was more or less legitimate to use a determined language.

In Piacentini’s intentions, architectural culture was strictly to be debated in a disciplinary sphere. The goal that Piacentini tried to pursue, not only by means of his direct actions, but also through magazines (Architettura was under his direction from 1932) and his academic work, was the development and circulation of an appropriate and dignified architectural language (respectful of tradition but not unacquainted with the avant-garde), suited to the customary level of technology, absent (in its diffused meaning) from the quest for exceptional solutions and, instead, more focused on furnishing an easily transmittable model.

Several of these objectives were common to the more intransigent formations of the avant-garde, however. Especially the one of building a common and wide-spread language was a direction that Giuseppe Pagano tried to follow, albeit along different ideological lines. And it was precisely this prerogative that constituted the battlegrounds between Piacentini (who certainly had the added weight of his powerful negotiation skills) with the Istrian Pagano and with the generation of young architects that Piacentini himself supported, to which, we mustn’t forget, also Giovanni Michelucci and Luigi Piccinato belonged. But the difference between Pagano (or another figure, an intellectual who lent himself to architecture: Pier Maria Bardi) and Piacentini was precisely the desire to indissolubly link a formal language (and for the former two, it was rationalism) to a political meaning. Bardi was the actual author of the famous pamphlet Report on Architecture (Rapporto sull’Architettura) for Mussolini (Rome, 1931), through which the regime wished for a clear legitimization of a determined “State art”, meaning fascist.

Piacentini polemicized with conservatives to the bitter end. He was attacked by the more stringent modernists, but always found a strategy of action that allowed him to elaborate his projects. He frequently reserved for himself projects in the central parts of Italian cities, like in Brescia, Turin and Genoa, which he executed with a well-determined formal language. But he backed Michelucci and the Gruppo Toscano, for example, in the building of the train station in Florence (1932-35) and called in other architects (Michelucci and Pagano, among others) to design the university city of Rome (1932-35).

The last years of the regime, from 1938 - with Germany’s increasingly impending presence, the promulgation of racist laws, the authoritarian rigidity that fascism imposed on the country – brought about profound changes. After the War, it was with dislike that the official and monumental rhetoric that often counted Piacentini among its promoters was recognized to have the connotation of “fascist architecture”. What had been the aspiration of most architects between the two Wars – to be the architects of fascism – was reduced only to an image that was superficially tied to that period. And Piacentini, who had cynically used his relationship with the regime to guarantee himself the necessary power to achieve his disciplinary aims, was identified as a strong ideological supporter of fascism.
 
The complexity of Piacentini’s role is completely absent in the publication that Mario Pisani dedicates to the opere maestre (most important works) of this Roman architect. The book, which is certainly not a pioneering text on Piacentini’s work, does not at all consider the role of organizer of architectural culture that his subject so bravely pursued. In this sense, the by now not-so-recent writings by Mario Lupano in Marcello Piacentini (Rome-Bari, 1991) are far richer in contemplation, as are the even older writings by Giorgio Ciucci in Gli architetti e il fascismo (Turin, 1989), or those by Paolo Nicoloso in his more recent Gli architetti di Mussolini (Milan, 1999).

The issue of the architect’s political responsibility is another element that is entirely missing in Pisani’s book. Sandro Scarrocchia took this subject into consideration in Albert Speer e Marcello Piacentini (Milan, 1999), although the book’s ambiguous title – a rhetoric expediency to discuss the comparison – hid the reality of their two completely different situations. Also the relationship that Piacentini had with German and Austrian culture is little explored, a theme that substantiated the book Marcello Piacentini. Opere 1903-1926 (1995) by Arianna Sara De Rose. The careful crafting of the book’s graphics and editing does not make up for its lack of fresh critical, documentary and bibliographic contributions pertaining to the buildings that Pisani examines. Even his choice of the opere maestre leaves some doubt.

Work of modest entity was included, such as La Quirinetta (1925) and the villa Piacentini at Camilluccia (1930-32) – both in Rome – and on the other hand, some important work is not featured in the book, such as the Piazza della Vittoria in Brescia (1928-32), the second part of the Via Roma in Turin (1934-38) and the high-rise on Piazza Dante in Genoa (1937-41). Moreover, even if one of the possible keys to examining Piacentini could have been to concentrate strictly on his projects (which might have worked as a symbolical excuse for Pisani’s provocative ideological “indifference”), why would he limit this examination to these few buildings? And especially, why would he do so without asking himself what Piacentini’s effective role was? What was his level of participation in a design effort that was spread out over a great mass of work, contemporaneously managed by several offices founded by the same architect? How many collaborators did he have in his professional practice and who were they?

These are the queries that his book does not satisfy in the least, appealing as it does to some kind of needed revision of the judgment of Piacentini’s works in order to relieve him from a presumed oblivion of which substantially this architect was never a victim.

Roberto Dulio Architect