There is a certain group of elitist architects in Rome who believe Il Corviale is an heroic architectural statement, too sophisticated for most people.

Such a wide-ranging post with examples from Stamford, CT (used to live near there) to Los Angeles (I live there now).

But I would add that there is probably no reasonable way to ’save’ something like the Corviale. At some point you are forced to choose whether to save or demolish, after the ‘do nothing’ approach has gone as far as it can. I suspect that the Corviale would not be culturally valuable enough to fix, save as a negative example. And I suspect that it would not be cost-effective to modernize either.

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Other examples of highly concentrated buildings as cities are much more successful. The example that comes most readily to mind is SOM’s John Hancock center in Chicago. This vertical city combines living, working, and shopping successfully as a modernist aspiration for the borghese class.

Given that both structures represent excellent architectural fabric the difference is primarily marketing and the political agenda that stands behind that marketing.

Other social experiments in Italy that are connected to diverse agendas have faired better. For example, Marzotto’s social city of Valdagno, the IVREA experiment of Olivetti, Edoardo Gellner’s ENI village in Borca di Cadore, and the wacky Salemi project in Sicily. Almost any aim (even one as perverse as Oliviero Toscani’s), other than putting people in little boxes and trying to convince them it is a home seems to work.

The conflation of politics and architecture is the main theme of the original post. The current agenda is sustainability – a poorly articulated catchphrase standing in front of a poorly articulated political agenda. By confounding the aims of historic preservation and politics one achieves success in neither pursuit.

In reality, the preservation of commercial architecture has always been an extremely difficult challenge. Two examples that comes to mind are Bullocks department store in Los Angeles and the Schocken department store in Berlin. Both were subject to the vicissitudes of radically changed economic, political, and commercial forces.

Buildings that are made for selling things have a need to reinvent themselves with the passing of time. A prime example of such a building in crisis is Andrew Geller’s (Raymod Loewy) Lord & Taylor department store in Stamford Connecticut – or – any of the main street modern buildings on the World Monument Fund’s endangered list. Here the crisis is provoked by the promotion of economic value ahead of cultural value.

It is ludicrous to think that the future of the La Rinascente monument should be any more dependent upon either its original purpose or its technological infrastructure than the Roman Colosseum. The transitory problem of the air conditioner (an area of technological research where Italy happens to excel) or the lightbulb should have no bearing on this problem. This is especially true given that La Rinascente is on the scale of a palazzo and not of a city.

The best thing to do, when there is no obvious path, is to do nothing. This is a fundamentally Italian principle that has saved the nation through its every crisis of the last millenium. Leave this buildings be until they can find an honorable purpose.

Terry Glenn Phipps