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The White City - Mussolini and De Chirico in the EUR
From: naples, Italy to Rome, Italy
Agents Report:
We got to EUR at around 1:30 pm. We started from the Piazzale degli Archivi, where all the architectural features of EUR were evident: although it was a working day, the place was deserted. There were surely a lot of people at work: a lot of parked cars. But very little evidence of life, apart from the crows in the sky. No employees on a lunch break taking a little walk, or smoking outside. The few people we saw just quickly got out of the way. Only the architecture talked to us, with its endless corridors and wide stairs, reminding also of Boullee’s impossible architecture, with its thousands of pillars and huge walls. We also drove to Sabaudia, to get another glimpse of rationalistic architecture in the similarly deserted and sunlit Piazzale del Comune and its tower. The Quadrato della Concordia, a building inhabited only by its statues, was the perfect metaphysical experience, letting us completely immerse ourselves in a De Chirico painting. We decided to come back at night to see what the scenery might look like then. We were struck by the view of statues gazing at the moon, a moment beyond the physical, where silence, absence of life, dilated spaces and rigid geometry suddenly seemed full of life and meaning. Antonio Negrini, Marcello Parlati
Original Briefing
How are people living in metaphysical spaces today?
Gallery
In his metaphysical paintings, Giorgio De Chirico foresaw the geometric, grand yet classical aura that fascist rationalism would later embody, and painted it on canvases. Later, this subtle layer of introspective stupor would show in Michelangelo Antonioni's films. If EUR's Colosseo Quadrato seems to be popped out of a De Chirico painting, that's not the only example of fascist rationalism winking at metaphysics. Whole towns in the Agro Pontino area were built that way.
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