My kind of town: Bob Allies – ADC

In 1982 – exactly forty years ago – I was on my way back to London having spent a year, or more accurately, nine months, at the British School at Rome. I’d first encountered the BSR two years earlier with Graham Morrison, on an office trip organised by our then employer, the architect Martin Richardson. The idea of coming back to Rome to spend a year at the British School pursuing my own research was irresistible: I submitted an application for the 1981 Rome Scholarship in Architecture and – somewhat to my surprise – I won it.

As at the French Academy – where historically the winners of the Prix de Rome (artists, architects and composers) had resided – there was no teaching at the British School: there was a bedroom, a library, meals and an extraordinary group of around 25 fellow artists and academics with whom to share one’s experiences. This, indeed, was the pattern followed by all the multiple national academies that were founded in Rome over the opening decades of the 20th century, including the American Academy, famously attended by both Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi.

When the first architecture scholars arrived at the British School in 1913 the research they embarked upon was principally concerned with Rome’s architectural legacy, and the methods they employed were primarily those of the measured drawing and the architectural reconstruction. This, of course, was a time when classicism still retained its hold over the architectural profession, although modernism was certainly beginning to assert itself: among the first architecture scholars at the BSR were the New Zealanders Amyas Connell and Basil Ward who subsequently established a pioneering practice in the UK with Colin Lucas, and whose projects included High and Over, a house in Buckinghamshire designed for the archaeologist and then Director of the British School, Bernard Ashmole.

By the time I went to Rome the focus had begun to shift. The architectural discourse led in the 1960s and 70s by Aldo Rossi, Giancarlo di Carlo, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Colin Rowe, Alan Colquhoun, John Miller, Joseph Rykwert and James Stirling had encouraged a reengagement with the traditional city, a renewed interest in its persistent typologies and in its cumulative, internally driven logic. For visiting architects it was increasingly the city’s urban history, rather than simply its architecture, that was compelling; its complex evolution and resulting multi-layered structure now seeming to offer pertinent lessons for contemporary practice.

In Rome, since the Renaissance, it feels as if the definition of space has always been more important than the definition of form”

What drew me to Rome in particular was an interest in the relationship between the fabric of the city and the buildings that constituted it. In Rome, individual buildings seemed capable of performing their own function – and expressing their own discrete architectural identity – while at the same time participating willingly in the wider urban structure, sometimes simply supporting it, at other times extending and developing it. Individual buildings – and their architecture -– were important, but the potential of a group of buildings to act in concert to frame and attribute meaning to the public realm was even more so. In Rome, since the Renaissance, it feels as if the definition of space has always been more significant than the definition of form.

What gave rise to this approach? The experience of the compact weave of the surviving medieval fabric? The imagined spatial morphology of Imperial Rome? Or as Norberg-Schulz argued in Genius Loci, Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, the inescapable influence of the primordial topography of the Roman Campagna?

Certainly in the 16th and 17th centuries it seems fundamental to the work of Roman architects Peruzzi, Michelangelo and Borromini. In the late 19th it underpinned the urban prospectus of the city’s postunification expansion, while in the early 20th century it persisted in some, if not all, of Mussolini’s urban interventions. And still, after the Second World War it remained exhilaratingly in evidence in radical projects, such as the Casa del Girasole by Luigi Moretti (1950) and the Rinascente department store by Franco Albini and Franca Helg (1961).

There is one further aspect of Rome as a city that must be mentioned before returning to home. This is the way that it has consistently shown itself able to accommodate change while at the same time preserving its history; its origins. In this respect it provides a model for how a city, any city, might evolve. The new need not be the enemy of the old; the present can co-exist with the past. For me, at the time, this seemed like an important lesson for us all to learn. And maybe, in the course of the last 40 years, we have.

Bob Allies is an architect, urbanist, teacher and author and a co-founder of Allies & Morrison.