Part IX-B: Around the World in 80 Days

By Temple Ligon
April 4, 2014  

Passepartout #2 and Rome, cont’d.
 
While Passepartout #2 was visiting in Rome over the 2012 Easter weekend, she had with her an architectural historian and urban designer who could play the pedant while pursuing high points in our civilization. The place to start, of course, was Florence, the capital of the Renaissance, but we didn’t have the time. We had to stay in Rome. For our purposes, the Renaissance could be followed from about 1350 to 1600, and we had plenty of late Renaissance designs in Rome to illustrate the era. Michelangelo died in 1564, for instance.
 
In the next era of design categorization, Rome was the capital of the Baroque which ran for about a hundred years after the Renaissance.
 
Among the major differences between the Renaissance and the Baroque was that the Renaissance designs were static while the Baroque induced movement; hence Rome’s street plan transformation for the Christian pilgrimage of 1600. Those long straight diagonals set up movement systems copied by landscape architect Le Notre at the gardens of Versailles and borrowed by Sir Christopher Wren in his suggestions for the redesign and recovery of London after the fire of 1666. Then the Frenchman L’Enfant, having become an American citizen, took the same street strategy and proposed to President Washington how the new District of Columbia should work. L’Enfant put in the diagonals of Versailles, where he grew up, and then superimposed over the diagonals a workable Cartesian grid, the kind found in Columbia.
 
In the latter half of the 19C the French tired of their Medieval mush of impassable streets and put into play another recall of Rome 1600 by way of Versailles, London and the capital of the United States. But all that was Baroque borrowing a bit from Renaissance town planning principles.     
 
During the Renaissance three major elements of urban design emerged: the return of the straight street and the return of the street grid, two aspects of Greek new-town planning along the west coast of Turkey 500 years before the Christian Era, and the introduction of the town square. Following the Italian Renaissance, some of the best–known town squares were installed in London’s Bloomsbury and Mayfair, such as Bedford or Russell or Grosvenor, long the home of the American Embassy. In France the town square was named the place, like Place de la Concorde where chopped heads rolled in the Reign of Terror. In Italy the town square was called the piazza, Rome’s Piazza Navona being one of the earliest.
 
The Piazza Navona as an urban space was not designed, really, but inherited. Originally a stadium built in 86 as a smaller version of the Circus Maximus, the former Circus Domitian gave form to the later Piazza Navona.
 
Following the Baroque, in just about all of Europe, the city spaces became what was visited and remembered, while in America visitors came to see individual buildings. This was the essence of architect I. M. Pei’s pitch to his prospective clients in the late 1970s in Houston just before he won the commission to design the tallest building in town, the 75-story Texas Commerce Tower. Pei pulled his building back on the block to leave a significant void, an urban space defined by the surrounding blocks where the buildings came up to the sidewalk, while his competition placed their footprint in the middle of the block like all the other single-block sites.
 
Arguably the world’s most beautiful town square was built in Venice, the Piazza San Marco, which took more than a thousand years to complete in staggered stages, the last being Napoleon’s turn.  A story about the Piazza San Marco, probably apocryphal, came out of the late 18C. A young man from London was on his grand tour, part of his classical education which included Venice, always Venice. He had a cup of coffee in the Piazza San Marco and enjoyed a short chat with a local girl, the most beautiful he had ever seen. Back in London he addressed a letter to her: To the most beautiful woman in the world in the most beautiful town square in the world in the most beautiful city in the world. She got the letter.
 
But plenty of people cite Rome’s Campidoglio by Michelangelo as the world’s most beautiful. As author and urban designer Ed Bacon put it, …it established more powerfully than any previous example the fact that space itself could be the subject of design.
 
To design space is to design with models besides drawings. Most profitable architectural concerns design on paper and on the screen, and when the design is pretty well complete, then a model might get built to give everyone a goal to achieve; that is, if the client can be talked into funding the presentation model. Even so, once the decision to build the presentation model is made, the design is already done.
 
To follow Ed Bacon, treating architecture as the three-dimensional art it is, models are built as design guides, study models to determine the shapes of the buildings and the interstitial spaces among the buildings and the context of the building and its adjacent spatial void, if there is one. Time consuming and money draining, model-building overhead can ruin a design budget. One of the architects famous for study models, lots of them eating up lots of time and money, is Frank Gehry, particularly what his firm went through to design the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, a building finished for $275 million, albeit the same size and seating number as our Koger Center which was built in the late 1980s for $16 million, a relative bargain.
 
Another bargain was our Columbia Museum of Art, although we missed an opportunity to design its context with a Renaissance-style piazza at the corner of Main and Hampton.
 
One look at the piazza potential at the corner of Main and Hampton, to the west of the Columbia Museum of Art, brings on a bit of remorse. The area just outside the doors to the museum is something of a paved yard fenced in at the sidewalk, while the entire street crossing should have been included in the urban space identified as the home of the Columbia Museum of Art. If any building in town should overlook a European urban space, the art museum is it. Instead of having the streets run through the urban space as they do in Italy and France, Columbia chose to put down pavers removed from the street and blocked off from the sidewalk with a faux fence, something similar to what can found where most members of the museum board live. Michelangelo would not approve.
 
When Michelangelo moved to Rome in the 1530s under papal invitation to work on the Campidoglio and other projects, the town population was not even 30,000. This was in a town that held more than 800,000 at the height of the Roman Empire. After the fall of Rome and the coming of the Dark Ages, unprotected people fled the city leaving behind building materials in the form of unoccupied houses. As Rome grew to almost 100,000 people by 1600, there were still many unwanted buildings available to cannibalize.
 
Passepartout #2 and I took a long walk through the Campidoglio, while I talked and talked and talked. Columbia’s L. P. Kyber had a summer job there as a librarian when she was a double major in economics and art history at Mt. Holyoke. Ms Kyber would see students every day from all over the world come into the Campidoglio and just stand in the center of the space under the statue of Marcus Aurelius, counting the people who walked to the right of the statue and those who walked to the left, his raised arm being the only break in the symmetry of the space.  
 
When Lincoln Center was being laid out more than 50 years ago, architect Philip Johnson operated under the influences of the Campidoglio.
 
About the same time Johnson was actively protesting the scheduled demolition of Pennsylvania Station in New York City. The Pennsylvania Railroad had decided its station above the street was not economically viable. The greatest train station in the world was not economically viable.
 
Around the turn of the last century, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Alexander Cassatt, invited the architect Charles McKim to design their new station in Manhattan.
 
The New York Central Railroad was moving ahead with its new station on Park Avenue, Grand Central Station. The tracks along Park Avenue were roofed with an elevated street, and even where the trains turned off Park Avenue became valuable real estate, such as where the Waldorf-Astoria was built.
 
McKim told Cassatt he needed to visit the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. The baths were completed in 217 under Emperor Caracalla. Roughly one thousand feet square, the baths could accommodate around 1,500 citizen bathers. Many bathers came with their own staffs, and the in-house slaves brought the total daily occupants of the baths to about 5,000. McKim wanted to study how the Romans got people through the right entries and out the right exits and how they followed the choice of library study, physical exercise or competitions; then they faced the sequence of the hot water (calidarium), warm water (tepidarium), and cold water (frigidarium), followed by time in the pool, called the natatio.
 
McKim inferred something of a parallel with getting out of a taxi and into the train station, purchasing tickets, checking bags, getting a bite, finding a newspaper and getting on the right track and locating the right seat.
 
Well into the 20C, airports picked up on the same considerations. Shopping malls owe the Baths of Caracalla as does the Disney Co. and its theme parks. And so it goes.
 
Touring the Baths of Caracalla was twice the fun when the Pennsylvania Station was taken into account. Passepartout #2 walked through the baths as a citizen working the sequence, ending up in the natatio, and then she would return for another walk through, this time as a New Yorker going to Philadelphia.
 
A whole separate discussion would be concerned with how the in-house slaves moved about without getting in the way of the bathers. Then there’s the admirable engineering and the constant supply of hot water and the constant flush of used water.
 
The price of admission to the baths was something on the order of a movie ticket today, and many days the Donald Trump or Big Daddy Warbucks of Rome or some other zillionaire would pick up the tab for the day. Everybody went to the baths for free.
 
The other building in Rome from the same period that was rebuilt for an entirely different purpose, the Pantheon, can be seen at the end of the academic quadrangle at the University of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson. It was put up as the school’s main library.
 
Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man is based on the circle and the square in the Pantheon design. The interior height of the Pantheon is the same dimension as the interior diameter. It’s about 142 feet, and no single diameter dome in the world beat that number until Houston’s Astrodome in the mid-1960s.
 
Passepartout #2 and I climbed out of bed every morning to see the Pantheon right outside our third-floor window, one hundred feet away.
 
Sentimental it may be, after several trips to Rome since my first visit in 1998 and after decades of studying and lecturing on the matter, I have to say the two most important buildings in the world are the Baths of Caracalla and the Pantheon. Argue as you see fit.