A mano libera

Nowadays, when larger parts of neighbourhoods are newly built, mostly by replacing the old building fabric, they often lack a sense of spatial quality. Have we, with a few exceptions, completely forgotten about urban development as spatial formation today? A look at Terni shows what added value and grandeur a formulation of public space full of character can generate.

Roman architect Mario Ridolfi (1904-84) made a substantial contribution to the transformation of European cities and to collective housing in the post war period. Over 20 years he worked on the urban definition and the development of collective housing projects for central Italy and specially for the city of Terni. His most important urban design from 1955 onwards was the masterplan for Corso del Popolo in the forementioned city. A project that was commissioned to Ridolfi, after he became a leading figure on the urban transformation of the city of Rome with two main interventions: Quartiere Tiburtino and the Viale Etiopia.

These two innovative experiences were at the centre of discussion for the definition of new urban tissue at the outskirts of the city where economic housing was to be designed from tabula rasa, redefining the limits of the consolidated city. His work was an attempt to extend the qualities of the historical centre, whilst using revised modern urban design strategies and the transformation of functionalistic typologies.

Ridolfi had theorized about this approach and built his first housing proposals back in Terni at Case Siamesi based on these ideas. Ridolfi’s attitude challenged the functionalistic urban implementation by transgressing the normative distances between buildings. But apart from that, it also did so by deforming the unconditionally orthogonal modern typologies of bars and towers into something that could avoid an excessive sense of repetition, dissolve the distinction between main and side facades and pursue a feeling of small-scale through his volumetric investigations.

Corso del Popolo and the use of the Palazzina

Il Corso del Popolo, Terni’s city centre, was however from a different nature. Thought as a plan of reconstruction and based on the continuation of a previous planning idea, it was aimed to densify the city’s historical area and redefine its connection. Surprisingly, Ridolfi’s main contribution challenged the previous plan that he defined as ‘a cold cut into the heart of Terni’ with the introduction of a rigid and formally defined typology, the Palazzina Romana. With its accurate dimensioning and positioning, he succeeded in envisioning the urban space as a fluid sequence of squares that defined the idea for the public space in continuation with the existing urban fabric.

The Palazzina as it was explained in the Magazine Metamorfosi N 8: Dal Vilino a la Palazzina, was a typology with its origins in Rome, characterized by transforming the dwelling ideas of the Villino type, a well-off single-family house in the countryside, into a house that could accommodate not only one but several families in a suburban setting. In that sense, it was a traditional typology thought to reconstruct an idyllical relation with nature, sun and ventilation optimized to modern economic standards. The Palazzina differed from the urban Palazzo due to its four-sided condition and the layout with corner apartments. The type however lacked an urban character, being the relation with the public space and predominately the street only in terms of access and servitude.

Urbanism of 500 meters: The grain of the city

Ridolfi spoke often of the idea of urbanism of 500 meters to refer to an idea of urban design that could be related to a particular size: the one that could be linked with a perceptual experience and simultaneously integrate town planning with close attention to the detail and materiality of the architecture. With this phenomenal approach, Ridolfi envisioned cities as a matter of urban craftsmanship based on what one can see while moving in the city. His drawings on top of photos of the existing testify of hi interests to create spatial sequences based on landmarks, galleries, facades and corners. The introduction of the Palazzina with small misalignments between buildings, the insistence on the relation between passageways and porticos, and the importance of the corner in his urban layouts, stemmed primarily from these observations and countered a more deductive, or birds-eye approach based on the implementation of urban solutions, such as axes, streets or squares.

Moreover, this approach is characteristic of the idea of thinking the city through its grain that became the key element to transform the imposition of a rigid typology into a sensitive connection with the existing. Imagining buildings as the skin of the city was related with the interest of making the buildings more porous. Firstly, by introducing visually connected public space in the ground floors such as porticos and passageways, but also in some cases with commercial galleries that would extend the public ground or the domestic entrances to different levels in the interior. Secondly, by introducing loggias for the apartments and outside spaces crowning the buildings. Those spaces, to see and to be seen, in addition to provide outside space for the apartments had an important representative character from an urban viewpoint. Finally, by expressing the building structure in the facade and the use of textured and tactile materials: pietra sponga and terracotta lattices gave the same grain and material porosity that one could find in party walls and facades of the traditional neighbouring buildings while the glazed tiles and painted ceilings acted as a joyful contraposition with their reflectiveness and colourfulness.

An approach a Mano Libera

The archive of Ridolfi preserves thousands of drawings drawn a mano libera, free hand. Massive in size, they range from urban proposals to detail definitions of stairs and handrails. In between, technical plans in scale 1:50 and elevations in relation to the context are also explored with the same technique.

Even more today, browsing in his archive, his way of working could be seen as romantic. It has been commonly accepted that his main pursue on working freehand, had not only to do with his talent as a drawer, but also with his belief in dignifying handcraft in an increasingly industrialized society fascinated by the idea of progress and new techniques. A social and political statement that had for him consequences even in the drawing table.

His position was that the drawing could include the qualities that those technics inspire in his work: on one side, the beauty of imperfection and the impossibility of endless repetition, generating variations. In the other, the possibility of learning while doing, spending time drawing and building, understanding the process of materials and finding opportunities that could feel natural to the material and the construction process.

As has been recently revealed, his approach was not even romantic in his time where technical drawing and blueprints were usual techniques, also in use in his architectural practice. A closer look to his design process and conversations with his former collaborators show that the way the studio worked was first producing rough technical drawings and, by overlapping layers of transparent paper, freehand drawings where then traced. However, the process was not one of aestheticization. For example, in urban studies, when a technical grid was clear and the position and dimension of the buildings was roughly established, a final step was to overlap a new transparent paper where the study will be redrawn entirely freehand and small adjustments and modifications were prompted to define the accurate position and dimensions of buildings.

The craft versus the model

The eye at 500 meters, thinking about the grain of the city, and working a mano libera made the drawing techniques, urban and architectural thoughts and construction methods to seem to go by hand from the definition of the city to the precise design of architectonic elements in Ridolfi’s work.

If we compare his methods with some contemporaries, also involved in the simultaneous definition of city fabric and dwelling, differences arise. In the same years, August Perret with a group of collaborators developed the reconstruction plans for the city of Le Havre. Similar to Terni, precise studies of the existing fabric and the development of an urban grid where undertaken. The differences appear when in Le Havre, the grid took an overarching role, being the general dimensional reference: from the dimensions of a street to the size of a room or a cladding panel. The grid was worked on and adjusted over and over, until define ‘a universal grid’ was defined. Opposite to that, in Terni, through the constant coupling with spatial perception and through the accumulation of exceptions, the ‘grid’ of the first studies is now impossible to recognize. It seems that Ridolfi, facing the impossibility of imposing an ideal in an engaged relation with the existing, opted to trust in his visual accuracy, his tactile capacity and the precision of the freehand.

On visiting both cities, even though both share a sensitive understanding of craft and construction, one can feel the difference of their approaches: the trust in a system of abstract relations opposed to the very precision of the senses. If the methods of Ridolfi shall teach us something, it is that through sensitive modifications of the general rule, the simultaneous consideration of different scales, and the planning of cities from sensory aspects, modern urban design could reconciliate with qualities of historical cities that seem to miss in deductive urban strategies and typologies. Something that Ridolfi’s work crafted, was the belief in the arrangement versus the clarity of the model.