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On Monday, October 27, 2003, about eight thousand
people, among which students and teachers, gathered together for an ovation to
architect Richard Meier, crowding the Main room and four other rooms in the Faculty
of Architecture of Valle Giulia in Rome. The architect held a conference in the
capital where he had to inaugurate the much waited for church of Tor Tre Teste,
at the presence of cardinals and bishops.
Meier was welcomed as if he were
a national team football player and held his conference surrounded by stadium-like
enthusiasm.
What did future architects and their teacher applaud? Catholic
religion, Meier as a star-system architect, Rome, or the church as architecture?
If we consider the latter as an answer, why? Almost nobody could answer this question
- "It's beautiful because it's beautiful," an answer that is reasonable
in a vet's waiting room, not in an architecture school.
Meanwhile one can
remark a first contrast in the name of the parish, God Merciful Father, which
does not suit austerity and sobriety recommended by Catholic religion at all;
that is, the not quite merciful amount of thirty billion liras. The church was
designed in 1995 but construction ended only in October 2003; the three parting
walls (vaults) in concrete are the synthetic and metaphoric image of faith, according
to the author himself. The vaults recall Aalto and have analogies to the sections
of the church in Riola di Vergato, near Bologna, constructed in 1968, which was
a little revolution in church type from the structural and distribution point
of view. Aalto's vaults are made in leather, Meier's are structural; both systems
allow natural lighting of the aisle thanks to the "sheads" (im. 1-2)
Beyond evocative metaphors and representation will, Meier's church is disappointing.
Why? For instance, because of the lost opportunity of restoration of a portion
of the outskirts, even if through a punctual intervention. The outskirts, as everywhere
in Italy where such areas are the worst in Europe, have few quality common places
except for the residual spaces between apartment buildings. These are improperly
called "parks" by the municipalities, since some streetlamps and benches
are fitted into them.
This church could actually be the opportunity of creating
an urban space, a square amid the neighbourhood's crossroads. Meier adopted the
Italian habit of the latest years according to which parishes enclose themselves
and just close at a certain time, like offices or cinemas. He promptly matches
safety requirements with gates and circumscribes his intervention area with a
wall. The habit of barricaded churches is in contrast with the most popular model
of open church which welcomes people in the area just before it, area which is
common and useful to both laic and catholic society. This is all the more true
in the case of Tor Tre Teste parish, which received five billion liras in funds
from the region Lazio besides seven billion liras funding from the Curia. Meier
enclosed his church within a two-metre-high wall in white cement, giving up the
possibility of offering a mediation space as a unifier between safety demand and
the need for qualified public spaces.
Meier sticks to the programme and creates
his quality urban episode like any other architect, in the middle of many urban
episodes, apartment buildings of the worst quality (im. 4). The enclosing wall
is white like the parish - the titan cement has photo-catalysts built into it
and this will allow candidness and inalterability through the time besides protecting
the wall from polluting agents (but will probably not protect it from the graffiti
artists of the district, always on the look for suitable surfaces, im. 3).
The project of this very white church had a hue of rigorously synthetic and elegant
abstraction, but such strength goes lost in the passage from the drawing paper
to the real building. As a matter of fact, it is over-dimensioned and the technological
and economic effort is enormous, starting from the ashlars in prefabricated concrete:
they are 256 and weigh 12 tons each, a true madness. Italcementi Group, which
carried out the work, proudly explained that they had to build a machine on purpose
in order to lay the ashlars. This machine resembles those used to build ancient
cathedrals and allowed three ashlars a day to be laid. 300 plates were needed
for the project, due to the great variety of the ashlars, and to switch from project
to execution 23,000 work hours were also necessary. Italcementi emphasizes the
fact that the vault walls, "full of religious significance," were "constructed
using advanced engineering solutions"; such solutions were obviously not
adopted for the church access, with a heavy cantilever roof supported by columns
that looks very much like the entrance of an anonymous middle-quality hotel.
Nothing seems to "fly" in this church, so much the less the bell tower.
This tower was voluntarily not chosen as the protagonist, to leave this place
for the visual and synthetic reading of the vault walls; it features a service
stairway worsened by the choice of "small balconies" and by the details
of the awful parapets in white iron (im. 5).
The search for synthesis and
rigour is also weakened by some architectural features: the back volume has a
series of different openings and windows (vertical, horizontal, narrow and large)
which match a decorative style not suitable for architectural abstraction (im.
6).
The window placed near the altar, where the monstrance is placed, which
is visible from outside the church, is unnecessary and moreover looks like a shop-window
for religious articles; even the openings at floor level near the altar, permitting
to see priests' and altar boys' feet during Masses, are superfluous. The essential
detail cannot be found even with a great imaginative effort and recurring to metaphors
and analogies (im. 7).
Meier's church falls short of expectations, most of
all because it fails to reach an important goal: that of being a landmark in a
country's capital city architecture, where a modern work without tiling has not
been constructed for a long time. This church does not begin anything: it is only
the final point of a long project. On that Monday, October 27, the hundreds of
students and teachers attending Meier's conference should not have clapped hands
without reserve, like teen-agers at their favourite singer's concert, they should
rather have asked questions - like in an architecture school supporting critical
sense and not unconditional acceptance of novelty
Mara
Dolce
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