Luigi Tour Part I

Today was our first tour with Luigi. . . it was about modern architecture in Rome, so not as fun  for me as Jeffery's tours were, but still informative.  We started out at Renzo Piano's Auditorium Parco della Musica (2002), which is a complex of three concert halls, plus an outdoor concert plaza.  It had some beautiful interiors and was pretty nifty in general.  However, I think it was more scultpure-as-architecture rather than architecture.  But, that's just my humble opinion!

Next we stopped briefly by the Olympic Village, designed by A. Libera and L. Moretti for the 1960 Olympics.  They were obviously outdated, but had some good qualities, too. . . like the amount of open green space the complex provides is quite astounding for being so close to the city center.  Luigi said that people usually buy an apartment and remodel them, and then they have really nice apartments close to the city center.

Then we went to the Palazzetto dello Sport, designed in 1957 for the 1960 Olympics, by Pier Luigi Nervi, (who was actually a structural engineer, not an architect).  Once again, it was kinda weird outside, but inside had some lovely details.

The last place we went was the Maxxi Museum, which was just finished a month ago, designed by Saha Hadid, who is an amazing woman from Iraq, but I don't really like the design. . . It really falls under the heading of sculpture-as-architecture.  Plus, it was trying to look very sleek and smooth, but you could still see all the joints between different materials, and well, just wasn't detailed very well.  And it was a modern art muesum, so I didn't get the art too well, either (except for the exhibition of architect's drawings).  There was one cool thing about it though!  In the concrete ceiling beams, there were tracs built in for lighting and other things like that.  That was nifty.

Well, I'm waiting for my cookie dough to rest, so I'll post about how that goes later!