ARRANGEMENT OF THE LUNGOTEVERE FLAMINIO AND OF PIAZZA MANCINI
The project followed on from a series of studies on the city of Rome, conducted both privately and at the seminar on architectural composition held at the Faculty of Archi-tecture at the end of the 1970s, which analysed the buildings, mostly residential, constructed between the 1930s and the 1960s in several key districts. More specifi-cally, the project derived from an interest in tall apartment blocks with service areas on the lower floors, and in their ability, or not, to make a crucial contribution to the formal and functional definition of the road and square. Ultimately, it rethought the urban centrality of the buildings of that period, which is more or less evident in each case, either due to design choices or because it was implicit in the practice of constructing a city. The project also sought to offer a new reading of those parts of the constructed city, a critical review of its technical norms, and an appraisal of its architectural rules, with the aim of identifying the methods used to construct the urban scene with regard to residential typologies. In doing so, the project considers similar solutions in other European cities dating to the same period, but also looks at examples in Milan and Trieste as well as Rome. The design of the individual work and the characteristics of the individual units of which it is constructed, were created by revisiting a number of carefully selected and much-admired buildings. In particular the tall apartment block in Piazza della Repubblica in Milan, designed by Giovanni Muzio in 1936; the two apartment buildings by Emilio Lancia at Porta Venezia and Corso Matteotti in Milan; the small apartment complex in Via S. Calimero in Milan, designed by Giuseppe De Finetti in 1930; Innocenzo Sabbatini’s two housing projects in Via Marmorata, designed in 1930, and the one in Viale delle Milizie, in Rome. The style and formal definition of the project are indebted to some of these edifices and to Perret’s residential skyscraper in Amiens and his competition project for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. The organization of the study area provides for the construction of a palazzata, or complex, on Lungotevere Flaminio in Rome, in accordance with the rule that had been followed in creating the aspect of that part of the street over the years. The palazzata is composed of a base with a walk-through gallery made of more solid materials than the rest of the project and is composed, in section, of an upper floor for shops and craft workshops, a mezzanine for offices, and a lower floor for small apartments. Residential tower blocks are supported by the base and grouped around a small cloister. Two of these tower blocks are located on a level with the Foro Italico bridge and are like propylaea with a perspective function. Further inside the area, there are buildings with a courtyard, which are two floors lower than the tower blocks to blend with the planimetry of the site. Piazza Mancini is left free, paved in stone and marked by four tall poles at the corners, which draw attention to its presence and the large space it covers from outside the area.
