Complesso
parrocchiale di
Nostra Signora del Suffragio e S. Agostino di Canterbury"
1992-1999
Via Walter Tobagi, 133
Località: Torre Maura
Comune di Roma.
Mq: 2.800;
Mc: 15.000.
Incarico del Vicariato di Roma. Opera Romana per la preservazione
della fede e la provvista di nuove chiese in Roma
Consacrazione: Cardinale Vicario Camillo Ruini, 10 Aprile
1999
progetto: Carlo Berarducci
strutture: Antonio Michetti
Church
recognizable as such. This is this motive for the realization
of this project. The recognition of the sacred.” Carlo
Berarducci
Nearing the heart of a place, being able to gather all its
complex truth and strengthen it with designs of new spaces,
at the same time invoking its transcendence and spirituality
through the quality of new forms. With this architectural
concept in mind for architecture we shall comment a sacred
building. The parochial complex constructed in Rome between
1995 and 1999, in ‘Torre Maura’ a district situated
along ‘Via Casilina’, is the result of the academic
experience acquired by the architect Carlo Berarducci within
the planning. Already, in the first phase of elaboration,
there were two starting points that animated the components:
its conformity and its history. On one hand the presence
of civil works and military fortifications, scattered in
the surrounding urban territory, object of reflection for
the planner. On the other hand, the characteristics of the
site, situated along an irregularity of approximately 18
metres, and its location in a suburban part of the city
that has rendered more binding the design, having to reconcile
the practical functional requirements and the necessity
to find a design capable of being a symbol for the city.
This dynamic relationship
between surroundings and building, once given the suggested
the architectural form, becomes remodelled; the complex
therefore resolves the problem of the rise in quota distributing
on different levels the various functions, all gathered
in one perspective. An excellent example of this is the
building called ‘Opera,’ because it’s
used for the community activities. It extends for 90metres
with a width of 10metres, like a ribbon, a runner that is
orthogonally to the main road of access; it cuts and at
the same time blocks the lottery.
Its belonging to the place is evident. The architectonic
organism appears as a compact mass, a dry wall, without
decorations other than the carved hole and the frontal stone,
an obstacle to the uninformed eye, that doesn’t have
the perception of the plastic result of the communitarian
halls that emerges in the background. Going round the linear
structure from the lowest point we encounter the long external
staircase that gives spirit to the ascent towards the church
square, marked by a procession of linear pillars, which
create a depth of shades, denying the rear walls to appear
on the surface. This vertical tone, strong and inexorable
allows itself to form a plastic background for the symmetric
vision of the articulated mass that constitutes the ecclesiastical
halls, whose style places itself unquestionably in a solid
form, as if it was a ‘still life’ of Cezanne,
defined by the cubical and cylindrical forms. Registered
in a square of 27 metres, the map of the church, is a central
typology in the form of a Greek Cross, with its arms at
right-angles, there length equal to one third of the squared
base, while at the four angles of intersection, there is
the insertion of the same number of cylindrical volumes
expanding the central space, surmounted by a large horizontal
cover, streamlined to the centre, that rivets the pattern
of the cross. The heads of the four arms of the cross are
risen in volume, showing themselves as true, real compact
towers and thoughtless, while behind they are characterized
by the large glass panels that transform them into luminary
canons in order to reduce from above the internal light
of the sacred area.
This prospective integration
of two organisms puts in evidence the simple geometric, but
potent, of both, addressing authoritatively the area and the
countryside through a dialogue at a distance, on one side
insisting on the strength and the beauty of contemporary architecture
‘meditated’, on the other side enforces the echo
of the roman pre-existence, a kind of invitation to stop and
contemplate.
Here the game becomes
very subtle between the antique and the modern: the use of
bricks in structural and aesthetics forms, the sequence of
the architraves that in correlation with the sequence given
by the arches at the foot of the ancient aqueducts, memory
of a firm solid ground, it also forced to overcome the differences
in level and the rise of altitude of the territory. Further
more we are aware of the competition between the height of
the church’s modern light towers and that of the ancient
watch towers; or we can hear the sounds of the wooden beams
left in the ancient stonework, through square holes 10 x 10
that perforate the mass of stone, giving life to the rays
of sun through the glazed globes.
Therefore the stylistic reference, chosen simply to transmit
a powerful static imagine, holds, in part, firmly to the ground
and in part to the sky. The building apparatus with all those
clear bricks seem to be a nut shell, a seed-vessel that covers
the internal white skin, a sort of protection of the recreational,
meditative and celebration spaces, but above all in the privacy
of the place. The opera does not limit itself in incarnating
the values of the spirit – that creativity from ‘The
Eternity’ and that of the construction by the architect,
at the same time the stereo- metrics produced from the mass
fixes the architecture to its rightful local surroundings,
and to the authentic history that it represents.
