New Buildings in Old Cities

This was the case with Gustavo Giovannoni (1873–1947). Soon after I arrived in Rome, my Notre Dame colleague, Ettore Maria Mazzola, introduced me to the traditionalist architects of the interwar period, among whom Giovannoni was the outstanding figure. Why had I never heard of these architects before? Why had we not learned about them in school?

In fact, there were dozens of architects who resisted the siren song of Modernism and continued to say new things in the old languages. Giovannoni was a leading architect and teacher, and much of what he taught was absorbed into the architectural culture, though his contribution is rarely acknowledged. While his British and American contemporaries Sir Edwin Lutyens, Paul Cret, John Russell Pope, and Bernard Maybeck were celebrated, he and his traditionalist colleagues in Italy were not. Why?

The answer is complex. A superficial reason involves a mistaken identification of classical and vernacular architecture with fascism; a truer reason is that the critics could not forgive Giovannoni’s opposition to the Modern Movement in architecture. For this crime, he and others were deleted from architectural histories of the 20th century, but since the 1990s, Italian scholars have taken a more impartial view. Our research is indebted to their efforts. This new book, the first on Giovannoni in English, allows us to share with you what we have learned.

Giovannoni had a multidisciplinary career that embodied his ideal of the architetto integrale—the complete architect—expert in architectural and urban design, architectural history, conservation of buildings and cities, public advocacy, legislation, and education. He was among the founders of the modern conservation movement, attending to both its physical and social-economic aspects, and developing perhaps the first and most coherent theory of restoration at both the architectural and urban scales. This, in turn, was based on a precise methodology for the study of architectural history. Many of his innovations are enshrined today in international agreements, such as the ICOMOS Charters and United Nations Declarations. He founded the School of Architecture at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and taught generations of Italian architects and restorers.

Our book, New Building in Old Cities: Writings by Gustavo Giovannoni on Architectural and Urban Conservation (Getty Publications, 2024) contains 30 excerpts from his writings on a range of subjects and from throughout his half-century career, framed by interpretive essays placing him and his work in their historical and international contexts. While his examples and case studies are mostly from Rome and Italy, his principles are truly international. The book is organized into six parts whose titles are Italian terms frequently used by Giovannoni.

Edilizia in Italian means both the activity of building and the ordinary construction that makes up the urban fabric of historic cities. Drawing the important distinction between monuments and fabric, Giovannoni points out that the former derive their meaning from the latter. The fabric was made up of architettura minore, or vernacular architecture. While he admired the great, monumental achievements of Rome, he also valued the modest construction that, following traditional types and patterns, provided a coherent setting that he saw as a “collective work of art.” It was the whole setting, not just the individual building, that should be the focus of preservation; indeed, a whole neighborhood or town could be considered a monument. He introduced these ideas into the 1931 Athens Charter on Restoration, the first international agreement in the field, and from there they, in turn, inspired the creation of historic districts in the United States and elsewhere. 

Ambientismo, from the Italian ambiente, or environment, is related to “contextualism,” but means much more; we render it as “respect for the setting.” For Giovannoni, the historic city was “a living organism,” and ambientismo denotes an attitude of respect for the city as it has developed through time, accumulating layers of history and character, and creating a reciprocal relationship between architecture and urbanism. Ambientismo entails a profound respect for the genius loci, the spirit of the place, including not only physical but also social and cultural character. In conservation work, priority goes to the maintenance of the site’s cultural significance above everything else. The American landscape historian J. B. Jackson perfectly expresses the concept of ambientismo: “In order to change a place, you must first love it; because if you try to change it without loving it, you will only ruin it.”

Diradamento is the heart of Giovannoni’s urban conservation theory, involving both the preservation of historic structures and the curation of public spaces. The term, one of many botanical metaphors he uses, is derived from the pruning and thinning-out of an orchard or a forest. Such stewardship and care of an urban quarter stands in contrast to the wholesale clearance practiced by Baron Haussmann, Le Corbusier, or postwar Urban Renewal in the United States. Giovannoni seeks to maintain the city in conformance with its geography, climate, ways of life, local materials, and traditional construction methods, freeing it from overbuilding or overcrowding and promoting public life in public spaces. Diradamento is an incremental and character-conserving process that avoids both uncritical preservation that would prevent all change and new construction that would significantly alter the historic character. This approach inevitably involves “bargaining” between conservation and new development.

His theory was tested in the Via dei Coronari in Rome, where surgical interventions exposed the impressive side wall of a Baroque church and formed intimate new piazze. In the Salicotto district in Siena, diradamento produced a mix of old and new buildings harmonious in character while increasing health and hygiene. Sad to say, massive clearance schemes predominated during the postwar decades.

Restauro, or restoration, seeks to make historic monuments whole to the extent supported by documentation or evidence. Giovannoni developed a comprehensive theory of restoration, proposing treatments ranging from pure conservation to major rebuilding with new material. He sought a middle way between the strict conservation approach of John Ruskin and the “stylistic restoration” of Eugène-Emanuel Viollet le Duc. He identified the early 19th century restoration of the Arch of Titus in Rome, in which the added elements are simplified and in a slightly different material, as a model for restoration that “makes the monument whole” but avoids confusing the historic parts with the restoration itself.

Giovannoni also recognized that there can be no fixed rules applicable generally. Rather, judgments must be made on a case-by-case basis. Different sites call for different approaches, from ancient archeological sites to places still in daily use. While he called his approach “scientific restoration,” beauty, or “the sense of art,” was always a preeminent value. Later critics would dismiss arguments based on aesthetics, clinging instead to what they took to be “objectivity,” but Giovannoni consistently sought balance among the relevant values.

Giovannoni codified his approach in the widely influential Italian Charter of Restoration of 1932, but in the 1960s, his views were contested by Cesare Brandi, a figure close to the Modern Movement and still regarded as the founder of the postwar Italian School of restoration. Brandi’s primary focus was on the authenticity of the historic artifact and avoiding falsification. The principles of both men were enshrined in official pronouncements of ICOMOS, UNESCO, and other international bodies, though Giovannoni’s contribution is not often acknowledged. The preservation world continues to be split between the heirs of Giovannoni and Brandi.

The key to Giovannoni’s conservation thinking is the relationship he saw between new and old architecture, a relation he characterized by the term Innestare. This, in Italian, means “to graft” and, in another striking botanical image, he describes an addition to a structure or the extension of a city as like grafting a branch of one tree onto one of another variety to create a hybrid. He recognized the need for change and to introduce new elements into a historic setting, but prioritized continuity of character at both architectural and urban scales. Current conservation norms are often interpreted to require contrast between old and new, but a contrived difference contradicts the purposes of preservation in cities that we regard as “living organisms.” The ICOMOS Valletta Principles (2011) reassert Giovannoni’s more nonconfrontational joining of new and old and warn against excessive contrast.

Giovannoni applied the concept of grafting in several thoughtful projects. His addition to the medieval Casa dei Crescenzi in Rome does not imitate the original landmark, and its traditional forms and style are easily distinguished from the historic fabric while being harmonious with it. This idea found its way into the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s Standards, with its requirement that new work be both “differentiated” from and “compatible” with the old. Fulfilling both of these criteria has proved challenging due to the highly oppositional character of much contemporary design. It was this contradiction that motivated Giovannoni’s resistance to the Modern Movement.

At the urban scale, the grafting analogy promotes the expansion of cities by means of satellite towns—independent mixed-use developments separated by green space and linked to the city by rapid transit lines, like the English garden cities being planned at the same time. Giovannoni master-planned two “new towns” near Rome but in the postwar decades, sprawl overwhelmed the city and its surrounding landscape.

Finally, we have ricostruzione or reconstruction. Many Italian monuments were rebuilt after the war following Giovannoni’s ideas. He supported reconstruction when there is sufficient knowledge of the historic condition to ensure accuracy and when a community seeks restitution of its monuments to reclaim its heritage and identity. Recently, high-profile projects in Germany have reconstructed portions of Berlin and Dresden. Under the influence of Brandi, current conservation theory remains skeptical, fearing the growing acceptance of “fakes.” Seeking a balance between material authenticity and community values, Giovannoni defended the rebuilding dov’era, com’era (where it was, as it was) of the campanile of San Marco in Venice after its 1901 collapse and was personally involved in the decision to rebuild the Abbey of Montecassino after Allied bombardment in 1944.

With the rubble cleared, there was just enough of the building left to inform a faithful reconstruction. Some improvements were made to secondary areas, and a new decorative scheme for the church interior was necessary. More controversially, the architect, Giovannoni’s former student Giuseppe Breccia Frattadocchi, designed a new Classical facade for the church, replacing the unfinished masonry of the pre-War condition, and he opened up the cloister arcade to provide a view into the valley landscape below. These additions were seen as “false” by critics, but defenders saw them as “completing” the monument, flouting the Modernist insistence on a rupture between new and old architecture.

While Brandi and his followers saw such reconstructions as “fakes,” some preservation authorities are more accepting of reconstruction today, seeing it as restitution to the community of lost heritage—a consideration outweighing the conformance of a building’s style with its date of construction. While the conservation mainstream continues to require visual distinction between new and old and sees any new construction resembling the historic forms as a “falsification of history,” Giovannoni’s viewpoint quietly continues to percolate through international documents and inform ongoing projects around the world.

The graduate program in historic preservation at Notre Dame takes inspiration from the values articulated by Giovannoni about the conservation of historic places and their importance as models for new construction that is more durable, resilient, and sustainable than standard building practices today. The historic cities he studied are already sustainable, and we can learn from them how to make more. Paraphrasing the French writer Francoise Choay in The Invention of the Historic Monument, “We restore in order to learn how to build.” This would make an excellent motto for any school of architecture and urban conservation today. Giovannoni would surely agree.TB