An interest in the modern probably arose in order to fill a blind spot that was artificially created during my formative years, producing an unjustifiable gap in knowledge. Later, in 1996, an absorbing piece of research intended for the compilation of an atlas of modern architecture prompted a first experience of the intense season of modernity, together with a series of exhibitions on the architecture and the art of the twentieth century.

This path subsequently brought with it my involvement in the worksite for the recovery of Luigi Moretti’s former GIL building in Trastevere, carried out by alternating questions of a historical and critical nature with the demands proper to a work of conservation and cultural enhancement [1].

These, then, were sufficiently constrained guiding parameters, in which new experiences and an experimentalism “guided” by a rigorous methodology of recovery gave value and meaning to the work of safeguarding, and shed light on a question of interpretation, so as to foster a better understanding of modern architecture. As tools in support of the “tactile” conservation of the monument, the historiographical reading of an age close to us in time, and a knowledge of a cultural climate observed even beyond the national borders, made it easier to draw up a reasoned “genealogy” of the modern.

Understanding the innovative process of modernity, set in motion in the 1930s, has also lent greater awareness to work bearing on our own time, by means of a debate enriched with present-day resonance for the enhancement and the virtuous use of a representative heritage. Conceptually, the historical reading, in order to trace the “genetic” process of architecture and art, has in these years of important international scholarship brought out the consequential logic of cultural phenomena, mapping filiations and derivations, or the renunciations, of a history without interruptions.

In the case of Moretti’s GIL in particular, contact with the worksite imposed the figure of Luigi Moretti in the guise not only of an emblematic author but also of a translator of the emotions that animated the dynamic of the whole of the last century. The stimulus of Renato Ricci was certainly a driving one, as emerges from the recollections of his son Giulio regarding the intense climate of experimentalism that stemmed from Ricci’s contacts abroad. As head of the ONB, Ricci favoured young designers over the “starchitects” of the day for the building of the youth houses. With these works there takes shape, beyond the modernity of the stylistic character of the new buildings, a true modernisation of the cities’ infrastructural network as well, new functions for carrying out the programmes of the regime and, in parallel, the emergence of new, participatory social models, even if these were certainly binding and imposed by the totalitarian vision of the client. From the years of his youth, in which the architect’s creative poetics, at first pervaded by a kind of infatuation with the rhetoric of the regime, later matured in the more advanced cultural milieus and in the European experiences of Gropius’s Bauhaus and of Baden Powell’s youth organisations. It was probably Moretti’s innovative and daring projects that led Ricci to prefer him at the Foro Italico, in place of Enrico Del Debbio, the original author of the master plan of the Foro and of the built front on the Tiber. After all, that modernist vis to which Del Debbio proved receptive in building the Colonia Elioterapica on Monte Mario, itself part of the Foro, went unexpressed in the buildings on the Tiber front, where a style poised between classicism and modernity, of a Piacentinian stamp, prudently prevailed. To Moretti’s courageous project for the Foro there is joined something messianic, in the will to codify geometric rules and golden ratios, new alchemical languages left unspoken, unusual formal characters present in the Casa delle Armi or in the monoliths, the silent milestones, of the central perspective at the entrance to the Foro.

At the GIL, good fortune had it that the alterations and the tamperings were reversible, “added” parts that overlay the original fabric; this permitted the great preliminary operation of subtraction, that is, the removal of all the elements that weighed upon the original structure. The worksite therefore proceeded under ideal conditions, working on an asset that was certainly degraded but fortunately free of serious obstacles to a return to its original configuration. In the course of the works at the GIL, an emblematic example of alteration was the one concerning the closing off, across all the window openings, of the glazing in the lower part; conceptually, this accretion had modified Moretti’s architectural lexicon at the GIL, turning the broad glazed walls into windows of a more contained size. And yet it was precisely the great transparencies that gave the building its character, aligning it avowedly with the great northern European examples of the Modern Movement. A modernity declared not only through its innovative formal value but also through its function, intimately bound to the physical presence of the artefact, in the GIL’s case through the way it drew the young children of Trastevere towards the activities carried on within the building. A scheme of visual communication, an innovative one, already conceived by Gropius in decentralised building types of an industrial character, such as the Fagus factory, a forerunning simulacrum of the modern of 1911.

Moretti’s contribution to the formal revolution at the GIL is evident, moreover, in the complex articulation of the volumes that make up the built work, a perception more apparent inside the structure than outside it: double heights, differentiated levels, structural pillars that change their form according to the spatiality they enclose; and yet, within this sophisticated layout, everything appears coherent and clear, almost inevitable, so as to express function and intended use.

This great creative capacity seems in any case to belong to a youthful sphere of Moretti’s, in which, over and above the prevailing of that investiture conferred on architects and artists to idealise the new image of the regime, one senses at a deeper level the strong emotional charge that such a responsibility must have carried, a spleen that is hard to make out in the postwar works, where “the craft,” by now fully mature, comes to the fore, along with the speculative tensions that often distort the aims of the profession. A certain carry-over effect after the season of modernity can be sensed in Moretti and in many architects such as Libera, Ridolfi and Piacentini himself, authors who had definitively drawn the face of modern Rome. In the postwar years, despite a form of professional “depression” arising from their adherence to the programmes of a regime disproved by the dramatic events of history, the architects remained active, completing many great works that the war had left frozen. For Rome, the ideal continuity of architecture and town planning is represented by the works for the 17th Olympiad of 1960, which brought that defining trend in the capital’s development to a definitive close. Moretti too took part in this phase with the last great demonstration of urban “collectivism” in the building of the Villaggio Olimpico, an elegant residential settlement of a Le Corbusian stamp, a synthesis of the modern codes for a choral theme of foundation.

For the former GIL, the new process of identity is represented by a dynamic that necessarily requires experimentation and research; indispensable to this end is the joining of active forces towards a design that will make its mark on the cultural panorama of the city, while still preserving the image of Moretti’s project. During the works, a contemporaneity prevailed between philological recovery and the launching of cultural activities; this spirit involved and “intrigued” technicians, operators and artists, a collective that authored the experimental character of this phase, open to interesting scenarios in which the functioning of the former GIL takes ever sharper shape. And it is indeed the identity to be assigned to this architectural simulacrum that is the compelling new prospect. The starting idea is that of the northern European kunsthalle, places that bring together cultural functions while at the same time providing a point of reference and material for study, fostering the encounter with, and the observation of, the phenomena of present-day culture. An ambitious project, and one consistent with the climate and the widespread interest in the themes of history and of the arts, but related also to the present through the themes of the quality development of the city and its territory. In this programmatic key, other disciplines might take part in the future design of the building: town planning, habitat, industrial design. The process in question could prove dispersive if a primary role were not granted to knowledge and to the critical capacity to interpret the ferments, or conversely the brakes, of our age, seeking answers of quality and drawing out the positive and strategic aspects of the present for an active and engaging laboratory.

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