Luigi Moretti: Works and Writings

by Federico Bucci, Marco Mulazzani

Luigi Moretti is the first English-language monograph on the Italian architect (1907-1973) whose monumental works include the urban plan of the Foro Italico, the Piazza Imperiale, and Palazzo Civilta Italiana, all in Rome, and his renowned entry for the E.U.R. competition of 1937. His post-World War II works include Casa Girasole in Rome, the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., and, with Pier Luigi Nervi, the Stock Exchange Tower in Montreal. In addition to his buildings, Moretti created an important body of theoretical works, published primarily in the journal Spazio, which he cofounded in 1950. Much adored by architects, Moretti's works have been largely overlooked by architectural historians. This beautifully illustrated book containing essays, projects, and an anthology of Moretti's own writings will introduce this important architect to the English-speaking world.

231 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2002

Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fuelled by some American academics, an obsession in the English-speaking world with Giuseppe Terragni, and nobody else, has long misrepresented the polycentric nature of Italian modern architecture, although this imbalance has lately been corrected, somewhat, by re-evaluations of Gio Ponti, Adalberto Libera and others. This new book on Luigi Moretti adds to that, and will be welcomed by anglophone readers familiar with Moretti's early projects for the Fascist regime, famously his fencing school overlooking the Tiber (1936) or his postwar Casa del Girasole apartments (1950) - a work as profound in its intentions as the great architecture of Rome's past, and welcomed by Colin Rowe and other anglophone critics as the expression of a modernity that goes beyond modernist dogma; those two buildings encapsulated - in the oeuvre of a single architect - the whole parabola of Italian modernity, from rationalism to postwar expressionism. Newcomers to Moretti may be equally intrigued by his later masterpieces in Milan, or his work in North America, notably the Watergate complex in Washington DC (1965), now notorious for non-architectural reasons.

This book approximately follows a format that is fairly standard for Italian architectural monographs: in this case, distinguished historians introduce and contextualise the architect's work; a middle section provides documentation about individual projects; and then comes a selection of Moretti's own theoretical essays on such matters as "The Discontinuity of Space in Caravaggio" or "Ideal Structures in the Baroque". The book concludes with a comprehensive list of all his projects and publications. This exemplary format is enhanced by beautiful monochrome photographs, reproduced with such clarity that one might almost call them perfect. But alas, the book contains no plans of Moretti's buildings, which makes these photographs merely frustrating. Surely we should be concerned that an illustrious imprint like Princeton can fall victim to this new disease infecting too much of architectural publishing: the almost total elimination of drawings. Publishers have a duty to provide this essential information, and we ought to be able to expect it. Here, the scarcity of drawings renders useless what would otherwise, alas, have been a very important book.

Because his grounding in Rationalism was dominated by Rome, like other Roman modernists in the 1930s Moretti was in a sense more profound than the "northern school" (Terragni et al). Unlike them, and as Bucci confirms, his poetic spirit did not seek inspiration in some theoretical Utopia; his understanding of modernity was just another layer in Rome's own dense urban collage (whose complexity Freud likened to a map of the human unconscious). Intensely aware of this reality, Moretti's investigations of modernity were rooted deeply in Mannerism and the Baroque; no more so than in the Casa del Girasole, where his use of disruption to express not triumph, but failure and collapse, is so close in spirit to Vignola and Giulio Romano. Through Moretti, perhaps we may understand them more exactly. His restless investigations explore the spatial labyrinths of a modernity that does not supplant history but is within it, surrounded by it.

The book puts an emphasis on Moretti's later work, when Fascist Rationalism was repudiated by all, or nearly all the Italian architects who had benefited from it and a new anti-Rationalist aesthetic of fragmentation, influenced by Bruno Zevi following his experience with Frank Lloyd Wright, began to transform Italian modernity. As a product of that transformation, Casa del Girasole looks like a ruined, distorted box, wounded and eviscerated by deep cuts that thrust right into it, in a troubled spirit that seems close to the spirit of Mannerism: chunks of rusticated Roman stone try to emerge out of the walls, as though one building were fighting to get out of another. Rightly, this is considered one of the masterworks of modern Italian architecture, but some may attach even more significance to his mixed-use complex in Corso Italia (Milan): seven distorted floors of accommodation that twist and turn along a narrow side street and create a small urban space, set back off the busy Corso. The mosaic finish of the building creates an absolutely smooth monolith that juts out dramatically over the pavement, in an angry cantilever of tremendous audacity. Emotionally, intellectually, architectonically and in terms of urban space, it seems to me that Moretti, in 1956, was exploring a spatial complexity to which many of today's architects still aspire.