POSTMODERN ROMANCE
A love affair with the Baroque, a playful sense of irony, a captivation with curves and a passion for patterns define the life and work of Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi
Do you know that I’ve always been rather fascinated by wallpaper?’ says Paolo Portoghesi gently, almost as if trying to break the ice. The 89-year-old architect, historian, poet, designer and mercurial icon of modern Italian culture shares a house with wife Giovanna in Calcata, a medieval hilltop town near Rome that has, in recent years, been repopulated by artists. The interiors feature a lot of wallpaper, mostly in patterns by William Morris, covering what empty wall space there is in the various libraries, studies, nooks and awkward anterooms. Everywhere are objects, miniscule and large, soughtafter and found by chance, geological and zoological, in equal measure. The almost ludicrously decorative home-cum-museum of a polymath architect and historian might feel oppressive, or at least too strictly preserved in aspic, but this house is far from stuffy. Here, where every inch creates a patterned juxtaposition of past and present, where Portoghesi passes nimbly through the warrens and menageries, everything, including the walls and those Morris prints, seem to be very much alive.
Despite an architectural legacy that spans at least six decades – ranging from the radical, concrete curves of Casa Baldi (1959-61) on the outskirts of Rome to the elaborately sinuous interior of the Mosque of Rome (completed in 1994) – Portoghesi remains a contentious figure in modern Italian architecture. The country’s merciless theorists, often contemporaries, peers and collaborators of Portoghesi, were not always kind.
In his History of Italian Architecture 1944-1985, Manfredo Tafuri asserted that Portoghesi’s work showed ‘a taste for excess but lacked any excitement’.
It is perhaps Portoghesi’s obsessive exploration of Italian, and specifically Roman, Baroque architecture that led to his isolation and categorisation as an adherent of historicism, a doctrine that was the very antithesis of 20th century architecture. Portoghesi was born and raised in central Rome, and the city’s monuments and their makers clearly cast a long shadow. He speaks of the precise moment when, as a young boy, he was struck by the cupola of Francesco Borromini’s 1642 church of Sant’ivo alla Sapienza, which was near his school. ‘It was problematic for me, but I was enchanted,’ he says. Borromini’s manipulation of geometry and perspective was full of paradoxes, such as the harmony between sharp points and soft curves: ‘I saw that poetry is expressed through architecture.’
The main reception room of the house at Calcata is dominated by a metal and glass screen, fixed on » a wall, which provides an alluring backdrop. It is
‘Postmodernism represented liberty. Of course, liberty can make you do irrational, absurd things, but we all need a spectacle’