500 Year-old Modernism:
a look at the future via the past

When we could still travel abroad (sigh) I spent a month at the American Academy in Rome discovering a rich and provocative model for a new vision of collective living, both stunningly modern and chronologically ancient.

At the complex of the Terme di Diocleziano (Diocletian Baths) a palimpsest of uses are overlaid in the same urban space; the ruins of the Roman baths (in service for the 200 years between c. 300 and 500 A.D.); Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, a basilica built within the still standing portion of the baths 1000 years later, originally designed by Michelangelo and dedicated to the slaves who built the original baths; and today the Museo Nazionale Romano, navigating among the nearly 2000 years of buildings, erasures, ruins and excavations. It is, like so much of Rome, a collapsed timeline that would be inconceivable in most locations but unavoidable in the Caput Mundi.

And that is just a record of the built overlays; it was a favored hunting ground for centuries and was essentially a quarry of highly refined spolia (Latin for spoils) for palazzi and churches. It was a millennium before the baths were uncovered (literally, as they were completely overgrown) and repurposed as a church and Carthusian Monastery.

The scale is unimaginably large, stretching from a seemingly disconnected half-circular piazza through the complex to the enormous 100,000sf cloister courtyard (itself large enough for 2 football fields) allegedly, but unlikely, to have been designed by Michelangelo.

Mick Angel (a very 70’s punk nickname I have always wanted to use) planned the church the last two years of his life, when he was in his mid-eighties, within a still-roofed portion of the ruined baths, and it was finished after his death. Nearly 500 years later we can still visit what was left at the end of the 16th century, though the church was oddly reoriented to its current configuration reversing the nave and transept.

Appended to the vast Cortile di Michelangelo are a set of monk’s cells (houses really) and gardens that are as thrilling and evocative as any piece of modern architecture. Past the “Staff Only” signs (which can hardly stop an intrepid architect) still sits a revelation about public/private, collective living, and the sheer modernity of these 16th century homes. These small homes have been mapped, quietly intact, gardens flourishing and orange trees blossoming as the city around them has evolved, from the Renaissance to the 21st Century.

Giambattista Nolli mapped Rome from 1736–1748 (famously treating interior public spaces as continuations of the exterior ones, and famously in figure-ground) showing us the Certosa (Carthusian Monastery) abutting the vineyards in and around the old baths. In fact the whole neighborhood is farmland, the rural part of Rome! And we learn that ‘Termini’ isn’t because the train ends nearby (as I always assumed); it’s the baths (Terme), stupid. Nolli’s map shows the Piazza detta di Termini a century earlier than any train or rail terminal.

The Nolli map is one of those things architecture students of my generation venerated with hung copies of the assembled panels (measuring 6’x7’) as affordable wall decoration, much to the consternation of our non-architect partners. The ichnographic (a word I have never heard, much less used) i.e. the plan, was an obsession of ours, a kind of obscured dimension of all things architectural. Lay folk could see an elevation (the façade, for instance) and all manner of perspectives (which is basically how we see the world) but the plan is an abstraction reserved for pros. We learn to see the plan when none is apparent to others, the way a basketball player can map the swarm on the court, or musicians can read compositions as narrative.

Once taught the language of the plan it is omnipresent. I can draw a plan of virtually every space I have ever been in, much as Mimi Sheraton has said she remembers every meal she ever had (and she is like 94 years old, so a LOT of meals!). It is the stenography of space, stripped to its most elemental and gestural state. The plan is necessary to build anything, but once built the plan kind of disappears; much like a recipe, necessary to create a meal, fades as we eat its results.1748 Nolli Map of Pantheon and area (for comparison with Letarouilly map below) 1841 Letarouilly map of Pantheon and area (for comparison with Nolli Map above)

Paul Letarouilly, 100 years after Nolli, published a nearly identical map of Rome, even cribbing the decorative gestures in the corners, without giving any credit to Nolli. Perhaps, like the recent article in the New York Times about Edward Hopper’s early painting (which were, it has been discovered, copies of existing paintings and not entirely original works) it was a practice run. Not much had changed in the 100 years between the two enormous efforts, in fact 70% of the buildings in Nolli’s map can still be seen today.

The smaller size and larger number of sections (18 vs 12 for Nolli) along with the linen backing (permitting folding) some versions have, implies the use of the map as a travel tool rather than a display of power. The folded size is about the same as a modern road map, and the timing fits nicely into the Grand Tours of Europe so beautifully laid out in David McCullough’s The Greater Journey (though he focused on Paris, where the map was published).

The figure-ground map was elevated in the new mass marketed travel guides published by Karl Baedeker starting in 1827. These guides were another obsession of architecture students of my generation. I collected dozens of them, never paying more than $10 each, and still love them for the perfectly delineated maps printed on tissue paper within the red leather bound volumes.

For my first trip to Rome I used an 1898 Baedeker, assuming that anything I was interested in would be in that guide. I was right and was intrigued, but never got to visit, the Diocletian Baths for some obscure reason. Somehow it took 40 years of travel and many dozens of trips to Italy to finally walk through the “Staff Only” door.

Each of these legendary maps, and a few lesser known in between, show the repetitive rhythm of the interlocked geometry of the monk’s cells at the Cortile Michelangelo. They were a constant presence and constantly documented, but never as thoroughly as Letarouilly eventually did.

After his exercise in plagiarizing the Nolli Map, Letarouilly began recording, in exquisite etchings, every single building of importance in Renaissance Rome (and elsewhere, more than 300 years after the Renaissance had unofficially ended). The images were of astonishing detail and accuracy, cataloging a moment far better than photography or writing ever could. Buildings are documented as plans, section, elevations and details, as well as copious perspectives including those magnificent cut-away views that unpack buildings in ways that only a drawing can.

These efforts took serious amounts of time; the original (well, copied) map took 5 years, and the others took the rest of Letarouilly’s life. Published in 3 volumes from 1840–1868 (he died in 1855) Edifices des Rome Moderne is the most exhaustive and gorgeous record of the Italian Renaissance that exists even today.

The American Academy in Rome has a beautiful library, or rather a set of libraries occupying an increasingly large proportion of the academy. So large, in fact, that in order to use it one needs an instruction session with the librarians. Entering the cube of a reference library, entirely lined with books from floor to high ceiling, is just the start. On axis is a long gallery, the read room, of open stacks (above the closed basement stacks and storage) and desks, where even walking seems to disturb the church-like quiet. Finishing the axis along an entire side of the building is another, smaller, more recently built library designed by Fellow Michael Graves, in his frankly dated style.

That small chamber at the Academy holds the rare book collection including its two copies (of course, two copies) of the 3 full-sized Letarouilly volumes Edifices des Rome Moderne. They are, unsurprisingly, amazing to see as originals, printed from the original plates engraved by Letarouilly and his band of engravers.

Letarouilly understood the significance of this monastery in the Diocletian Baths, a rather simple and minor corner of Rome; he spent as much time (and plates) documenting them as he did some of the more spectacular palazzi, churches and fountains.

And it makes sense that he did; they are an idealized vision worth the time spent. The 7 remaining cells (of the original 20 Letarouilly documented) linked and organized by the enormous courtyard, create a paradigm of remarkable clarity; public and private, individual and collective, man and nature, isolation and community, all in an architectural form that has resonance even today.

They are 500 year-old modernism. And not just modern 500 years ago, but still modern today.

Admittedly there are even older versions of these dwellings and I am a bit late to the party; Le Corbusier famously visited the Certosa del Galluzzo outside Florence and sketched the 14th century monk’s residences, making them the basis for his Immuebles Villas. And while much has been written about this connection between modern architecture and the formal elegance of the simple monks’ houses, even that modernity is now a century old.

The genius of these dwellings suggests new models for collective living, enormously relevant today as the existing norms seem insufficient to address changes in how we live.