ITALIAN ARCHITECTURE IN THE EAST. ASTONISHING VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

Luca Molinari

In ancient times, the inlet separating India from Sri Lanka was much narrower, almost as if the two lands could touch each other, and merchants from the Chinese and Roman Empires met there to exchange goods and information. A fact confirmed by archaeological evidence. I have personally always been fascinated by the idea that certain historical places were actual space-time portals connecting distant, apparently separate worlds, and that they identified specific, transitory places for communication, proving the world has always been small and subject to unexpected connections.
I have also thought about those merchants of Italian origin who traveled to the edges of the world as we knew it for at least two thousand years. People of the Roman Empire were followed later by the Genoese, the Venetians, and the Pisans, who set up trading posts along the entire Mediterranean. Monks and churchmen took the silk and spice roads to evangelize. Artists, engineers, architects, and artisans were brought for their technical skill and artistic mastery. All together, they created a powerful flow of knowledge, information, products, and languages that has fed a significant part of human history.
The political fragility of the Italian peninsula, fragmented into a thousand bell towers and conflicting interests yet united in its central position at the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, made Italy a natural hub for crossings and coexistence that spilled over into every cultural, artistic, and economic expression and made its people open to understanding the different worlds they encountered to secure the best conditions.
For nearly two millennia, this land thrived on powerful reflections of its ancient classical culture. Shaped during the imperial era, it was regenerated for centuries through several creative eras, thereby establishing the aesthetic, symbolic primacy of Italian art, which attracted political and economic elites from the farthest reaches of the world.
Political fragility, commercial expansionism, and artistic primacy fueled the flow of countless
Italian merchants and artists, forced abroad to open new economic routes and offer services considered exclusive to Italian culture.
However, this situation made Italians adopt a different cultural and psychological attitude different from other peoples because – unable or unwilling to take an aggressive, colonialist approach – they always showed an ability to adapt and understand the different conditions around them, often turning that into a capacity to unite them in a perspective that can create original, far-sighted results. This adaptability was combined with a deeply humanistic education that eschewed rigid, dogmatic perspectives of the world, prioritizing human beings, their traditions, the prime position of reality, and the ability to build new worlds by interpreting existing conditions through unusual choices.
Architecture as a discipline readily embodies this idea, since architects have always felt the need to create tension between their individual creative path and the context they have been brought in to transform. In the case of architects summoned to lands far from their own, this condition becomes even more intense and complex.
With the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the beginning of what we now call the Middle Ages, relations between Eastern Europe and Italy began to strengthen. The need to open and reinforce trade routes to the kingdoms of the East and China, missionaries traveling to catechize unknown lands, and the influx of technicians, artisans, architects, and engineers sought for their military and building skills merged with an enduring, widespread fascination in the East with the glories of an idealized Rome that had intrigued emperors and rulers for centuries.
All the travel reports and many of the works created are joined by the mindsets and cultural attitudes of these figures, who shared a distinct ability to connect with these far-off worlds and listen to them carefully, before recounting and translating them in different, original ways. Between the dawn of the first millennium and the nineteenth century, there are two main threads that give substance to these considerations. The first is the silk and spice road as a flow of goods, ideas, and narratives that fed a unique, original dialogue between Italy and China, from the chronicles of Marco Polo to the writings and maps of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who scientifically showed a world still shrouded in in mystery. In both cases, the authors not only traveled in order to learn about the world, but they also settled in and assimilated into a world that they became part of to the point of gaining a certain consideration not afforded other foreigners. However, the flow went both ways. The reports of these authors, as well as of other merchants and Jesuits (such as Athanasius Kircher’s brilliant, imaginative drawings) presented Italy with a figurative, dreamy portrayal of the Celestial Empire that became an era of chinoiserie that inspired Italian and later European courts for at least two centuries.
A second important thread was that of the road leading Poland and especially czarist Russia, starting from Ivan III’s powerful, growing kingdom, which opened the doors to a constant flux of architects, engineers, and artisans who would give a decisive influence on the development of aesthetic ideas in modern Russia. The Assumption Cathedral in Moscow by Aristotele Fioravanti and the walls of the Kremlin with its towers by Pietro Antonio Solari and Aloisio Da Carcano are an original merging between the Italian Early Renaissance and a local reality still seeking its stylistic identity. The primarily technical contributions of these architects, who introduced advanced construction processes, merged with an exceptional formal innovation that laid the basis of institutional Russian architecture.
The many towers that followed the development of the Kremlin walls are a striking exercise in stylistic invention, combining the geometry and shapes of Early Renaissance Lombardy with the decorative culture of Russia, creative innovative architecture that would decisively impact the institutional taste of this kingdom, at least until the building of St Petersburg and the beginning of another quintessentially Italian adventure. In this case, a steady stream of rulers including Peter the Great, Catherine I, Elizabeth, and Catherine II focused their political and ideological will on the new capital city as an architectural testing ground with the intent to align Russia with the other great, enlightened powers of Europe. Here, while philosophy was meant to be French and engineering German, Italy was clearly favored for art and architecture, especially for bringing the modern neoclassical style to Russia. Once again, this was not simply an act of cultural importation/colonization.
For nearly two centuries, Italian artists like Francesco Rastrelli, Domenico Trezzini, Antonio Rinaldi, Giacomo Quarenghi, and Carlo Rossi brought to the new capital a quality classicist education and
a modern idea about architecture for the state. The original coming together with the rarefied light and love of color in those lands laid the foundations for a new generation of modern architects, starting academic and professional training not before found in Russia.
The involvement of Italian architects and specialists in Russia lasted at least eight centuries and involved a process of assimilation and exchange that was decisive for the history of the local architecture, at least until the early twentieth century when the political and social situation experienced through the Soviet Revolution and Constructivism became central to the training of modernist architects like Giuseppe Terragni.
A new architectural era dawned as Italian involvement in the East went through a form of globalization within an increasingly complex world. Several Italian architects, after Fascist expansionism, worked in Albania, the Dodecanese, and Eritrea, spreading a sophisticated, stylistic “Esperanto” throughout the territories. Others traveled in response to the call of the new Chinese world, especially to Shanghai, and others pursued the Soviet revolutionary dream. Each of these fragmentary experiences betray a special attention to the context as an ideal physical place to be investigated in order to create always original forms and spaces.
Ironically, Italian architects are currently in a condition similar to that of the sixteenth century, with a weak state that does not invest in promoting its professional excellence internationally, an immense individual capacity to seek quality opportunities elsewhere, and the primacy of Italian technical and creative know-how, still recognized for its humanistic approach and fine-tuned attention to places and their communities.
The examples collected in this volume – including RPBW, Massimiliano Fuksas, Mario Cucinella, Archea, Michele De Lucchi, and Piuarch in the Russian Federation, China, Albania, Georgia, and Vietnam – clearly reflect this situation as well as the ability to forge a new identity by paying attention to places and their deep traditions, making humanity central to the designs, and prioritizing quality in the use of light and materials, the relationship with the surrounding landscape, and the details of the construction.
We find this same situation in the work of other Italian architects like Gae Aulenti, Italo Rota, Mario Bellini, Piero Lissoni, Antonio Citterio, and Patricia Viel who have worked in India, Japan, and Indonesia, in addition to the aforementioned countries.
For Italian architects, the idea of innovation moves through a circular, humanistic conception of the environment and sustainability, imagining places as integrated fragments of necessary urbanity and invents forms and languages to express a subtle, rarely aggressive visionary quality that relates carefully to its context.
In a world where distances have been dramatically reduced and styles are often flattened into a single formal mainstream aesthetic with no identity, the work of many Italian architects attempts to forge symbolic ties and rooting in places that are trying to redefine their personality for a future that requires both social and technical innovation on the performance and human scales, and domestic warmth rather than depersonalized environments meant only for consumption.
Every time Italian architectural culture has experienced the power and autonomy of taking
a lateral, critical perspective of design, it has created original works and theories that have made a difference.
Rather than following the dominant thinking inscribed by other cultures, Italian architects may be destined to be nomads; curious, humble travelers aware of the history they bring with them, obsessive cultivators of the “state of the art,” enamored with the life coursing through the places to which they have been invited, and aware of the concealed languages and meanings each place can reawaken. This is the only way contemporary design can have the power to create the future and leave behind original works worth remembering in the years to come.