More Pictures of Miami's St. John Newmann

Below are three more pictures of the Saint John Newmann Church in Miami, by architects Javier Cenicacelaya and Iñigo Saloña.

Rossi's Housing Block in Gallaratese, Milan

This housing block made Aldo Rossi famous. In the seventies it was published in magazines all over the world as a premonition of the architecture to come: an architecture solidly rooted in history (Rossi often cited traditional Italian housing compounds as his inspiration) and an architecture that assumed an active role in the formation of urban communities (the building's porticos and plazas were conceived as spaces for people to gather and interact with each other).

Unfortunately, the architecture advanced by Rossi came, opened the door to stylistic irony and historicist sentimentality, and then disappeared from architecture magazines (and became a marginal phenomena in architectural practice).

Visiting the Gallaratese compound today is enlightening in many ways. Its directness is still a compelling argument for an architecture whose use can be easily identified--an architecture that points towards the archetype of its typology--and can thus be understood in relation to other buildings, as a piece of a larger urban context. 

The problem is that the context where this housing block was built did not develop quite as Rossi would have wished. Other housing complexes in the area are organized in heartless apartment towers and slabs surrounded by parking lots and empty space. The Gallaratese district lacks an articulated urban fabric. The Rossi compound is thus isolated--its isolation is heightened by a wall that surrounds it, and warning signs at its entrances that caution against trespassing. Rossi's public spaces are not so public anymore. 

Visiting the Gallaratese housing complex is also enlightening because it lets you see what books and magazines often do not--Rossi's block does not make much sense when seen separately from Carlo Aymonio's. Aymonino and Rossi evidently worked together in the design of a single complex, with common structural and spatial patterns. Rossi's slab is enveloped by Aymonino's V-shaped building; the public areas between them serve as articulations. 

Aymonino's building in this complex did not become quite as famous as Rossi's, perhaps because it is more complicated in its design, and heavier, in a way that recalls Rudolph's brutalism. Rossi's design, on the other hand, was direct, to the point, and genuinely different from what was being built at the time.

Satelite's Towers

Mario Pani commissioned architects Luis Barragan and Matias Goeritz to design a monument to mark the entrance to Ciudad Satelite. This monument consists of five concrete towers with triangular plans painted red, blue, yellow and white on an elongated plaza surrounded by a freeway. 

As the rest of Satelite, the towers are automobile-oriented: they are best seen from a car. As you drive north towards Satelite they appear unexpectedly, and the street points straight ahead at them. As you approach them you realize their incredible size. Not until you are a couple dozen meters from the towers does the road turn and makes you circle around them. 

A couple years ago, the Mexico City government built a second freeway over the southern section of the freeway that leads to Satelite, to alleviate traffic. Now there are plans to build a second level on the freeway's northern end as well. Even if the towers themselves are not touched, the modification of the freeway that leads toward them would make the experience of them quite different. This would be a tragedy. 

Mexico's Ciudad Satelite was Conceived as an American Suburb

In the late fifties there was a water shortage in Mexico City, so efforts began to direct urban growth beyond the valley where the city was located. Mario Pani, an outstanding architectural and urban innovator, conceived "Ciudad Satelite," a new neighborhood designed to function as an independent town, connected to Mexico City by a freeway. 

A visit to Satelite today makes it clear that Pani's inspiration was the post-war American Suburb, with winding streets and houses with front and back yards--as opposed to the Cartesian street grid of traditional Mexican cities, and the preeminence of the enclosed central garden in Mexican architecture.

Another piece of evidence of what Pani envisioned for Satelite is the American-style shopping mall he designed as the new town's centerpiece--it was the first of its type in Mexico. This mall, on the freeway that communicates Satelite with Mexico City, was surrounded by a sizable parking lot. Architecturally, it was a box with no windows similar to those built in the United States during the fifties. (This building was later demolished, giving way to a much larger mall.)

In the end, Satelite did not turn out quite as Pani and its developers expected. Soon, it was swallowed by Mexico City and became just another urban neighborhood, with radical juxtapositions of use, and areas with high density and heavy traffic. What did remain of Pani's vision was a strong urban identity that is shared today by the people of Satelite.

Arquitectonica

The 1982 Atlantis Condominum in downtown Miami by Arquitectonica is a bold building, with unexpected shapes and colors. This work is a celebration of the frivolity of Miami as a city obsessed with image and celebrity, and with lots of money to spend. It was famously (and apropiately) featured in the Miami Vice credits along with women in bathing suits, flamingos, windsurfs and speedboats. 

The Atlantis launched the Arquitectonica firm into stardom. Their ability to capture with such clarity the identity of a city in a building was indeed a notable achievement. As Miami's population exploded during the eighties and nineties, many of its new buildings were designed by this firm. Unfortunately, their later work is not quite as fresh as the Atlantis. It consists mostly of tall buildings with capricious shapes that do not always manage to convey a sense of place (or to stand out from what other architects are doing in Miami).

During my visit to Miami one other building by Arquitectonica caught my attention: a parking lot in South Beach. This structure was built over a group of existing buildings and disguised behind heavy gardening. This is a nice gesture both because of the preservation of the older buildings (which are probably protected) and because it hides a parking lot without pretending it's not there. The building is a nice addition to Miami; like the Atlantis, it makes for an interesting sight and is somewhat irreverent.

Miami's Art Deco Architecture

Miami is known for its Art Deco architecture. There are many buildings in this "style" in the South Beach area. I recently took a walk there and was most surprised by the poor quality of the architecture. The buildings in South Beach are not spectacular--similar ones can be found in many places in the U.S. that had considerable growth (and not much money) in the twenties and thirties. The façades are flat and the massing is unremarkable. Compared to the overwhelming (in size, composition and sophistication) Deco buildings of cities such as New York, those in Miami are not impressive. None of them is valuable in itself.

This does not mean, however, that the Miami Art Deco district is uninteresting. It is fascinating that someone had the vision to restore the area's buildings and convert them into an expression of the city's identity. There are dozens of cities in the U.S. and elsewhere that have lacked this vision and destroyed what was valuable or could have been made valuable of their architecture. Miami has a nice "traditional" district where tourists flock and where commerce thrives. Miami has a neighborhood with which its population identifies, and which brings them together as an urban community. Few cities can take pride in having achieved so much with so little. 

San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena

This early work by Aldo Rossi remains unfinished, and there appear to be plans to modify it considerably. In fact, part of it has already been modified. Yet this does not seem to bother many. The woman at the entrance of the cemetery said that few people visited, and that she could hardly understand why I did. In her opinion the building was ugly and depressing. Similarly, I met some Milan architects while in Italy who could not believe I would rather visit works by Rossi than others by more fashionable architects, say Libeskind or Fuksas. They thought of the cemetery as nothing more than an extravagant curiosity.

I was bothered by the general lack of appreciation for this building, which I consider one of the most significant of the second half of the 20th century. Few have achieved to make architecture metaphysical. Entering the cemetery is like entering the world of platonic forms, where time (and thus decay) does not exist. The visitor is inevitably confronted with death, but also with the hope for eternity; the cemetery's simple shapes and spatial configuration separate visitors from their everyday lives and introduce them into something like a Cartesian plane where truths are constant and irrevocable.

Rossi's exploration of the simple shapes and architectural elements is also a statement on architecture itself. While Libeskind and Fuksas might spend days and weeks and months making sure their buildings do not look like buildings, Rossi struggled throughout his career to apprehend and communicate in his designs the essence of the basic components of the built environment--walls, columns, floor and roof slabs, and hallways, porticos, windows and doorways. Hence the cemetery's repetitive and exaggerated gestures (which many fail to see as more than caricatures). In this way, Rossi was similar to the Russian Suprematists and the Dutch Neoplasticists, who painted compositions of lines and planes in basic colors to achieve spiritual effects.