Campus Utopias: Sapienza University of Rome

Città Universitaria Sapienza University of Rome Marcello Piacentini, 1935

Scuola di Matematica Gio Ponti, 1934

The new campus of the Sapienza University in Rome, 1938, courtesy of Wikipedia

SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY OF ROME Marcello Piacentini, 1935

SCHOOL OF MATHEMATICS

Gio Ponti, 1934

AR2AA010-A Yasemin Parlar 5284007 Y.Parlar@student.tudelft.nl

Tutors: Esther Gramsbergen Yağız Söylev Agnes van der Meij

TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment

April 16, 2021

REPORT CONTAINS MAIN ANALYTICAL DRAWINGS AND ELABORATED CAPTIONS INTRODUCTION

CITY SCALE CAMPUS SCALE BUILDING SCALE DETAIL SCALE REFERENCES

Introduction

Situated in Benito Mussolini’s Rome of the fascist period, La Sapienza University’s main campus, designed by Marcello Piacentini in 1935, was conceived as a source of national pride, a place where monumentality and unity portrays Italian culture in its grandest form. Also known as Cittá Universitaria, or university city, the campus is meant to be a city within a city that not only houses the numerous faculties like physics, mathematics, chemistry, medicine, law, and so on, but also contains services such as libraries, laboratories, museums, cafes, a post office, bank, police station, chapel, and recreational areas. The main ten buildings that face the “T” shaped open public space are arranged in a ground plan form that resembles a basilica church plan, and with the use of classic Italian architecture as an example, they all have ornament free, symmetrical façades that have simple punched windows and monumental entrances. Travertine cladding on all of the front façades of these buildings emphasizes their unity, while also creating a bounding wall that defines the exterior spaces as an urban room. Urban interiors are seen throughout the medieval city center of Rome, and these piazzas that create breathing space between narrow corridor like streets are recognized as spaces for social gathering. By modeling the main piazza of the campus after Piazza Navona, the largest and most recognizable of these exterior rooms, Piacentini is able to capture this familiar element of the city and place it at the center of his campus design. The tree lined wide avenue that leads from the entrance propylaeum to the piazza, and frames the view of the rectorate building, is also a recognizable feature seen throughout Rome in the fascist period, such as at the Vatican with the Spina di Borgo framing the view of St. Peter’s cathedral and Via dei Foro Imperiali creating a visual axis between Mussolini’s office at Piazza Venezia and the Colloseum.

Capping one end of the main piazza, Piazza della Minerva, on campus is the School of Mathematics by Gio Ponti. While at the front façade the building conforms to the guidelines of the overall campus design by using travertine and the 1:1.5 proportions for the openings, the volumetric and curvilinear nature of the rest of the building purposefully rejects the designs of the others. The building remains somewhat opaque at the front façade to retain the quality of acting as a wall for the exterior room that is the piazza. On the inside, however, the building takes on a crystal-like quality. The layered spaces that open up into an interior courtyard are all glazed and therefore allow for visual connections from across the building. The interior of the building, thus, removes itself from the design of the rest of campus and reflects the experimental nature of its own design. With the use of geometric windows that reflect various programs on the interior of the building, Ponti is able to capture varying effects of daylight in the spaces and the rooms are naturally illuminated by guiding and reflecting the light in specific ways. Although the building represents a moment of tension between the rationalist Italian architecture on the rest of campus and a modernist building in its core, the School of Mathematics still alludes to classical Italian forms. The distinct volumes of the buildings that encompass the various programs also resemble buildings that existed in tradition Italian campuses. The library volume represents the palace, the drawing studios are the galleries or arcades, the stacked lecture halls become the theater, and these buildings all surround the main piazza, which is the courtyard. With a repetition of façades on the exterior and interior elevations, there is a constant reversal of interiority and exteriority.

City Scale

With the expansive demolitions commissioned by Vittorio Emanuele III to create avenues that cut through the dense medieval urban fabric of Rome, and the subsequent construction of the Termini train station in the second half of the 19th century, the center of Rome started to shift towards the East. While the political center remained in Piazza Venezia, which would later house the office of Benito Mussolini, the entrance to the city migrated from Piazza del Popolo in the North to Termini Station in the East. In the first half of the 20th century, interventions and new constructions in the city under the rule of the fascist party resembled those of Vittorio Emanuele III. Long, expansive, tree-lined avenues framed views of monumental buildings built in the Italian rationalist style. These references throughout the city influenced Marcello Piacentini’s monumental design of the main campus of La Sapienza university of Rome in 1935. Aiming to be a form of national pride, the campus takes influences from within the city such as its main avenue that mimics the Spina di Borgo in the Vatican, and its main plaza, Piazza della Minerva, using the same size and proportion of Piazza Navona in the medieval city center.

Campus Scale

Arranged in the form of a basilica church plan and designed in the rationalist Italian style that takes inspiration from classical forms while avoiding ornamentation, the main campus of La Sapienza university creates a familiar sense of urban interiority at a monumental scale. The master plan, which was conceived by Marcello Piacentini in 1935, includes nine main faculty buildings and the rectorate building which surround the “T” shaped main piazza. Green spaces are primarily used on the perimeter of the campus for recreational use, while trees and greenery at the center is used to emphasize the organizational axes and visual connections. The central public space acts as an urban room with the façades of the buildings around it acting as bounding walls. The use of travertine as a cladding material, and standardizes proportions for openings in the front elevations, creates a sense of unity across the buildings. The purposefully opaque façades with their small openings, further emphasize the interiority of the exterior public space.

Building Scale

The School of Mathematics by Gio Ponti is one of the main ten buildings on campus, and along with the School of Earth Sciences, it caps one end of Piazza della Minerva. On the front façade, the building mostly conforms to the general design of the campus, however unlike the other buildings, the façade does not extend the full footprint of the building allowing for setbacks on either side. These setbacks create room for secondary, more private, entrances that lead students directly to their classrooms. Approaching the side entrances, the geometries of the building drastically change. The strong and simple linearity of the front is replaced by several volumes of different heights, curvilinear forms and a variety of different types of openings. The transparency and experimentation with windows is also seen on the interior with its layered spatial quality that allows for implied transparencies throughout the building.

Detail Scale

The experimentation with the windows can be seen even at a detail scale. The angled openings at the rear façades of the library and also the lecture halls are used to guide the light towards the ceiling and reflect off of the surfaces to indirectly illuminate the room. The atrium in the library and in front of the lecture halls both use a monumental window to tie together multiple spaces sectionally, and the use of the skylight in the library adds the layered quality of light in the space. The placement of the windows within the structure of the walls is also very strategic. The windows inside rooms are all pushed to the outer face of the walls, and along the corridors they are placed flush against the wall. This creates a parallel relationship between the interior rooms and the exterior courtyard which then becomes another “interior” room. The play between interior and exterior, which is a major concept in the design of the campus (influenced by the urban rooms of Rome), is reflected in the smallest details of the School of Mathematics.

References

Baratelli, Guia. La Città Universitaria di Roma. Costruzione di un testo architettonico , Milano 2019.

Beese, Christine. About the Internationality of Urbanism: The Influence of International Town Planning Ideas Upon Marcello Piacentini’s Work . Bauhaus-Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur und Planung, 2015.

Kallis, Aristotle. The Third Rome, 1922-43: The Making of the Fascist Capital. Springer, 2014.

Kostof, Spiro. “The Third Rome: the polemics of architectural history.” (1973): 239-250.

Marcello, Flavia, and Paul Gwynne. “Speaking from the Walls: Militarism, Education, and Romanità in Rome’s Città Universitaria (1932–35).” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74 , no. 3 (2015): 323-343.

Mornati, Stefania. L’edificio della Scuola di Matematica di Giò Ponti alla Città Universitaria di Roma , “Bollettino dell’Unione Matematica Italiana” 1 (2002), 43-71.

Roche, Helen, and Kyriakos N. Demetriou, eds. Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany . Brill, 2017.

Salvo, Simona. Conservation and modern architecture. Fortune and misfortune of the School of Matematics at Rome University (G. Ponti, 1932-1935) , Roma 2015.