Tre anelli. Paul Marie Letarouilly, Les Édifices de Rome Moderne (1831-1870.

In the imagination of architects, Rome is, after Athens, the repository par excellence of classical architecture. The vast presence of ruins and ancient buildings – as well as the reuse of spolia in later buildings, for reasons of convenience but above all for ideological reasons – has always constituted a privileged field of study for architects and preservation architects, as well as for architectural historians. The knowledge of Roman architecture acquired through the practice of surveying is the foundation with which every architect has been scientifically equipped since the Renaissance. It may therefore seem surprising that Paul Marie Letarouilly devoted thirty years of relief and reconstruction work to Roman Renaissance architecture and not to classical architecture. Or, conversely, one could reconsider the importance of his essential contribution and its historical limits from the point of view of the foundations of modern design, which immediately raises a methodological question. The interest of the massive work with the programmatic title Les Édifices de Rome moderne lies in the fact that it is a selective and methodological collection of the Roman Renaissance architecture that the author considered relevant. The ideological principle of the demonstrative re-foundation of classical architecture, which Letarouilly proposes on the basis of the legacy of the Roman Renaissance, is based on the synthetic reorganisation of the materials of antiquity in a new disciplinary dimension. The author does not confine himself to collecting case studies in order to create a purely evocative or descriptive exercise in the modernity of antiquity. By interpolating order, rationality, and visual elegance, Les Édifices de Rome moderne is the result of a semantic research that shifts the purely visual datum to the level of abstraction based on the synthesis of forms, reflecting the depth of the conceptual dimension of architectural theory inaugurated in France in the previous century. The three volumes of plates and the one of commentaries that make up Édifices de Rome moderne are thus a vast and organic book in the form of an architectural project. The work as a whole reorganises the heritage of Roman Renaissance architecture, transposing the memory of the Classical to a new semantic level. By reshaping, redesigning and organising the case studies in an original collection, Letarouilly makes them reusable on architects' drawing boards, thus influencing subsequent generations of designers, as evidenced by the significant circulation of the work in Europe and especially in the United States. In terms of representation, the development of a 'purified' system of signs, which by its very nature is pedagogically transferable, is at the heart of the programmatically critical operation proposed by Letarouilly, which goes beyond the technical subject of the relief of existing buildings. The systematic use of the simplex-linea graphic trace proves that Letarouilly had entrusted drawing with the role of a synthetic writing metodology, capable of representing the essence of the specific semantic values necessary to codify a new type of architectural text: the renaissance of the classical in modernity. This idea of reconnecting with the classical through the Renaissance by means of the relationships between design, construction, and use reflects the dimensions of the necessary and the symbolic. In this way, Édifices de Rome moderne demonstrates that the abstraction inherent in 'pure line drawing' as a means of reinterpreting the classical in Renaissance architecture corresponds to an 'idea' that, as 'form in the intellect', has ceased to coincide with the real.