Paolo Portoghesi – ANSELMI, EROLI, NICOLINI Editoriale – Abitare la Terra, Rivista di Geoarchitettura, n° 33-34, anno XII 2013

Drawing of the proposal for the National Archive in Firenze, Alessandro Anselmi

In 1963, when I started teaching in the Faculty of Rome, in the complementary course “Letteratura Italiana”, student insurrections were about to mount. I immediately noticed that, among my students, there were a lot who knew things that I never heard or saw before and I understood that teaching and learning are two inextricable moments. I was obviously interesting in opening their horizon and explaining them things they didn’t know nor hear, but I was open to contamination, open to confrontation with those who “came later”.

I remember, among my first students, Sandro Anselmi, Giovanna De Santis, Franco Purini, Laura Thermes, Renato Nicolini and Rosanna Fraticelli, the three couples that I watched form and then grow, and many others, like Franco Pierluisi, Pier Luigi Eroli, Anna di Noto, Paola Chiatante, Francesco Montuori, Duccio Staderini, Gianni Accasto, Lucio Valerio Barbera, Sergio Petruccioli, Ruggero Martines, Giorgio Ciucci, Sandra Latour. 

Every one of them left a trace in that half century separating us from those years: as it happens with wines, great “years” of architectural culture came to mature.

Sandro Anselmi, Pier Luigi Eroli and Renato Nicolini passed away close to each other, and this recalled that experience now far in time, the great value of knowing them and their friendship. Sandro Anselmi designed buildings that will remain in architecture’s history, Pier Luigi Eroli gave much to Roman culture while remaining in a humble shadow; Renato Nicolini became famous beyond architecture for captivating Rome in a joyous rite.

I can’t trace complete biographies of these three protagonists in such a tight space, so I will just recall their major defeats because, in the history of culture, defeats can be more important than victories, when their cultural value compensates the lack of translation of ideas in built works or when a defeat contributes in denouncing problems pushed back sine die and never solved, continuously reappearing.

For Sandro, defeat was his give up his revolution, an act that led him to great heights but in a different direction.

For Pier Luigi, defeat was implied in his way of being, his whispering voice pronouncing his convinced narrations, in his will to load himself with any burden without asking anything in return.

For Renato, defeat was the continuous denial by his political party to nominate him for major of Rome, a thing he aspired rightly so, after his extraordinary results as Assessor for Culture when he reinvigorated the rather dull cultural activity of previous administrations, by adding an unprecedented series of events appreciated by international press, the now famous Estate Romana.

[…] 

Sandro Anselmi, together with Pier Luigi Eroli, Franco Pierluisi and other eleven architects, founded GRAU, Roman Group for Architecture and Urbanism in 1965 and they declared a poetics in open contrast to architects who considered political commitment a valid reason for abandonment in formal research, to renounce any artistic ambition in a sort of surrender to science and technique.

Their argument originated from the critic to the modern movement and the stalemate of their research: 

«[…] And the price payed by the Modern Movement was a double impotence: from the transformation of the society on one side, through purely formal social illusions, and on architectural design on the other side, through the fake assimilation of social, technical and typological parameters with impossible compositional laws […] There is a new way for architecture where all the figurative heritage is placed «horizontally» in the field of our interests, as a group of possible choices for «logical» solutions to issues in the preservation of that particular heritage but also for the mutations into completely new compositional orders. […] the problem we want to discuss here is architecture as art. Art is a form of thought: multiplicity as unity, truth, judgement. A thought that enacts and realises itself through specific organisations of signs and techniques, particular for every art.»

Their distance from historical avant-garde was clear.

«[…] A whole century has passed since everything had to be unhinged, unbalanced, reduced to mere existence, to matter, to elementary simplification, to an enormous catalogue of technical notions, sensations, images, new techniques, after that the crystallised body of the Academia has been devoured and led to a swarm of forms, those poetics have now reached a historical role, they have completed their role as necessary moments of knowledge. But since they are still trying to be universal meanings of working with arts and are still using poetics and stylistics that are updated with  rules of cultural consumption but outdated from a level of true knowledge, those poetics must be debunked and rejected, since the artistic gesture is not of mere sewing or composition as an afterthought, but a preconceived synthesis, conceptual relationship verified and realised in a unity of matter and sign, molded and organised. Abstraction defined through specific architectural signs;

Relationships cannot be, then, open, unbalanced, dynamic, centrifugal, transformational, subjective. On the contrary it is closed, balanced, static, centripetal, objective.»

These poetic declarations of disconcerting unconventionality, that should be taken in account if someone will ever write a proper history of those times, coincided with the diffusion of Louis Kahn’s architecture; they were somehow alike, but with a different grade of theoretical self-awareness.

The architectural work of GRAU, even if delimited geographically and enclosed in a somehow provincial landscape, had great heights to be discussed beyond the personal stories of its fourteen members.

One of those heights, to my view, is the proposal for the National Archive in Firenze, designed by Anselmi, Eroli and Pierluisi.

A difficult, complex work, capable of dealing with issues both new and ancient, issues now completely neglected, and above all, a work capable of tearing apart the idea of architecture as a pure empiric procedure, without any theoretical base. A project full of fertile contradictions as if they were a homage to the coincidentia oppositorum by Niccolò Cusano. The maximum of ideology with the maximum freedom of composition, the greatest connection with history (through classical forms and allegories) and the greatest technological innovation in assembly; the most laconic architectural forms together with the richest perspectives, drawn on the outer walls; The greatest geometrical clarity against the landscaping complexity of the “stepped valley” that holds three symbolical cores alluding to “three phases of historical development: oppression, fight, victory”.

The need of “higher tones” to represent this work reaches a level rarely seen by other avant-garde groups. “Absolute organicity” is pursued, the necessity of mythology is claimed, complete unity of drawing, sculptural and architectural arts, each used in their most effective way, is strived to, the relationship with Firenze is deeply studied and even “the presence of the past” is hinted with the inclusion of the Gigantomachy from the Pergamon Altar. While reading the report (the motto ISTI MIRANT STELLA was more than a simple program) we are left stunned by the blinding intensity of the discourse, the courage of a clear political faith. The conclusion of the report is an example: 

«… In the end this symbolical representation intends architecture through a particular point of view, possible only by including everything in an ideological-political dimension, capable of guiding mankind — historically determined — to become the real protagonist of history: the dimension of Communism». 

We could be surprised by the radicality of this research but we must not forget that not much time has passed from “Le Ceneri di Gramsci” by Pier Paolo Pasolini; what should be of surprise it’s the fact that those who tried to write history didn’t notice all of this.

Two years later the GRAU won the competition for a new Flower Market in Sanremo with a high quality project, but then the municipality withdrew and built a low profile design, completely different. That was a clear symptom of a “sentence to marginality” that one can escape from only by changing everything. 

With the façade for the Via Novissima in 1980, the GRAU left a sort of testament. It was a tomb with fourteen recesses, because fourteen were the members of the group, and in every one of those recesses was an urn. It’s difficult to find an optimistic interpretation for such an act. The less pessimistic one could be the will to write an elegy for lost hopes, to deliver to history an operation that had to be abandoned in a way or another.

Pier Luigi had placed a great mural in the narrow passage that led to the Corderie in the venetian Arsenale, where Via Novissima was, made up of fifty oil paintings, right in front of the installation by Mendini and his exhibition of “banal objects”. In his intimate isolation, nurtured by loyalty and altruism, Pier Luigi was still faithful, unwilling to surrender and showed to me his will to design far from power and politics.

“Contro l’Amnesia” was born this way, a work for Belgrade, a group of thesis works and wonderful illustrations for a book by William Morris “News from Nowhere”, published on the magazine “Eupalino”.

Some years later he participated to a competition for the transformation of the chaotic Christmas Market in Piazza Navona in a better suited event for a capital city and its tradition in ephemeral structures. He designed a boat-like shape, where the market would be enclosed, a giant “Barcaccia” that happily conversed with Bernini and Borromini, showing discretion, obstinacy and courage, three virtues that Pier Luigi had in abundance and his friend could never forget.