Terragni's Danteum

The Danteum, or Architecture tells a Big Story.

"In . . . Terragni's work we find the idea of a city built with fragments, which relate to one another according to . . . a classical order . . . . [The] work focuses on the recomposition of absolute form . . . . The rules and elements that they adopt are atemporal fragments of a whole that doesn't exist anymore, and are explicitly related to a language that can only be rescued by using a different grammar." (22)

Terragni: "Architectural monument and literary work can adhere to a singular scheme without losing, in this union, any of each work's essential qualities only if both possess a structure and a harmonic rule that can allow them to confront each other, so that they may then be read in a geometric or mathematical relation of parallelism or subordination. In our case the architecture could adhere to the literary work only through an examination of the admirable structure of the Divine Poem, itself faithful to a criterion of division and interpretation through certain symbolic numbers: 1, 3, 7, 10, and their combinations, which happily can be synthesized into one and three (unity and trinity)" (25)

"The new architecture, the real architecture, must derive from a strict adherence to logic, to rationality", and for the Gruppo 7 in Italy, a "spirit of tradition". Modern architecture without the machine aesthetic. The Danteum is an abstract, metaphysical, magical object - designed as "a wanderer in the city" - "the possibility of creating and communicating myths is born from [the] conflict between everyday reality (setting / context) and magical objects."

The Rationalists to aimed to convince Mussolini that modern architecture could symbolize the fascist revolution, its system, its hierarchy. The Danteum was conceived of and presented to Mussolini just before the second world war (which killed the project). Terragni died in battle.

The building was to sit at the corner of Via dei Fori Imperiali and Via Cavour (in view of Mussolini's balcony at the Palazzo Venetia) in dialogue with the basilica of Maxentius and Constantine - an important link between the empire, church; and beside the torre dei conti. "The torre littorio" was a rhetorical campanile repeated by the Rationalists as a traditional symbolic element of Italian architecture.

The Danteum is conceived of, at once, a metaphor for Dante the man, a parallel to the Divine Comedy, an embodiment of the state (and the relationship between church and state); practically it is a place of scholarship (museum and library for Dante's work (meant to promote nationalist spirit) and a great vault of knowledge on Dante.

- Paradiso - thirty three glass columns support a transparent frame to the sky - "a floating space" supported by the forest below. - the long corridor room of the empire is described as the "germ of the architectural whole" , and displaces space from both the inferno and the purgatorio and lies parallel to the axis of via dei fori imperiali, reinstating the connection between the piazza venetia and the colliseum - making the danteum a microcosm of terragni's conception of the empire. - interdependence and physical separation of paradise and empire room symbolizes the interdependence of the church and empire, each of which dante believed derived its power directly from god.

- to terragni, the universal roman empire is the only thing capable of saving the church from disorder and corruption.

"The Danteum is the reconstruction of a space in which to live a miraculous adventure. The adventure is that "higher aesthetic value," and can be reached only through formal and logical relationships that one can build following an abstract and nearly invisible trace." (27) not a perfectly cited set of notes.

All ideas "stolen" from: Schumacher, Thomas l. The Danteum: Architecture, Poetics, and Politics under Italian Fascism. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.