The via Giulia Garden, Rome
We envisioned LAVINIA as a device, almost like a Scheherazade, for storytelling, as if these stories were "threads to be unraveled".
To (re)begin, we’d like to tell the story of a vast empty space on Via Giulia in Rome, next to the Liceo Virgilio, where the stables of the emperor Augustus, princeps, once stood.
In 2010, the City of Rome granted a private company permission to build an underground parking garage, following, of course, the necessary archaeological excavations. Local and international architects, including David Chipperfield and Diener & Diener, were invited to “reconstruct” the Renaissance urban fabric. This is how Diener & Diener describe the site on their website:
“Via Giulia was built in Renaissance Rome to cut through the medieval city and impose a sense of order. When Mussolini demolished historic buildings in the 1930s to make way for his grand avenue connecting Ponte Mazzini and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, he broke the street’s unity. The failure of this monumental Fascist project left a void at Piazza della Moretta, which has remained empty for seventy years.
Today, the architectural goal is to restore the Renaissance profile of the street, while the open space will be transformed into an underground parking facility. Archaeological excavations on the site revealed the remains of Roman stables. The fully documented archaeological site will be re-covered with a protective layer of soil.
Rather than rebuilding the demolished structures, Diener & Diener chose the garden as the guiding principle for restoring the street’s profile. Neither classically styled nor modern buildings could have recovered Via Giulia’s former unity; they would have simply erased the lingering traces of the street’s urban history.
The concept of a garden, however, underscores historical continuity: where Fascist plans once overlapped with the Renaissance city, now a garden overlays those very plans. A high wall runs parallel to the street’s historic façades. At one point, the wall opens onto Via Giulia. It frames and defines the experience of the new streetscape, without ignoring or suppressing the scars inflicted here in the 1930s.”
The project unfolded in fits and starts. In 2017, it was once again presented to the City of Rome. As part of the overall vision, Maryam and Roger Diener and Diener & Diener enriched the architectural proposal with the donation of a gate by the artist Monika Sosnowska and a fountain by Enzo Cucchi (originally, both elements were to be designed by the studio).
Asking Enzo Cucchi to create a fountain where the Nymphaeum of the Loggia dei Vini once stood, and Monika Sosnowska to create a new gate to the Loggia, was an homage to that unrealized project—a kind of ready-made, a way of telling one of Rome’s many “hidden” stories, a desire to support the realization of the Via Giulia Garden, to bring a refined intuition to life. Diener & Diener’s proposal to transform the void into a garden, rather than develop it into a hotel or private apartments, (which would have been far more lucrative) was a textbook détournement of a commission: the kind of “missing link” that artists and architects often offer, and that history only occasionally knows how to recognize. In Rome, can two plus two still make five?
To be continued…
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder, Gianni Politi
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding,
Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder,
Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska