Meier

I recentrly visited the "Jubilaeum church" of Richard Meier in Tor Tre Teste, in the suburbs of Rome. Simply perfect, and the comparison of this church with the "Ara pacis", that is not a very successful building, imposes a couple of consideration. The first is that the commisioner of a building does matter: the Church has a little more experience than Walter Veltroni in art and architecture. The second is that the leftist government of Rome of the former years wanted to break drastically with the past in inserting a modernist intervention in the fundamentally baroque urban tissue of the centre of Rome - but at the same time asked Meier not to break too drastically with the case that dated to the '30s of the last century and was a modest example of fascist rationalism -so that the german architect was obliged to reconcile his "lecorbuserian" conception with the fascist pompous attitude, he had to mantain more or less the original proportion and the organization of the ceiling, he had to build a wall of travertine - travertine was much loved by fascists because it reminded the Colosseum, but originally travertine was a relatively poor material that was hidden - in the Colosseum and elseqhere, by wonderfully coloured marbles .... In practice, the usualo stop and go strategy of PCI-PDS-PD

Ara Pacis

Now the debate has a little went down, but the case of Ara Pacis by Meier created even two parties: the left defends the building, whereas the right hates it. The arguments are wether the case is beautiful or bad, or if we should destroy or preserve buildings that are marks of the past, or if the case inserts in the (ugly and chaotic) surroundings; but, strangely, nobody speaks of the Ara Pacis itself. We are all discussing the architectural qualities of the case, but we are indifferent to the fate of the masterpiece that the case should preserve. I recently visited the monument; I'm afraid it pays an original sin: it was placed in that particular position along the Tiber not to present it in its context - it is completely disconnected from the original context now and was disconnected from the context when in the Morpurgo's case - but because Mussolini wanted to present himself as the new Augustus. I would have preferred that, when the Ara Pacis was restored a few years ago, it had been transferred in a museum, for instance in the Capitolini Musea or better in the national Rome Museum. There it could have been put in connection with other pieces of art of the time. Instead, we asked Richard Meier to answer an impossible question, and we are blaming him because he could not solve it.