Armando Brasini (Rome, 21 September 1879 - Rome, 18 February 1965) was a prominent Italian architect and urban designer of the early twentieth century and exemplar of Fascist architecture. His work is notable for its eclectic and visionary style inspired by Ancient Roman architecture, Italian Baroque architecture and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.[1]
Armando Stefano Ludovico Brasini was born in the Roman district of Tor di Nona from a family of modest background, the son of Augusto Brasini and Rosa Piersigilli.[2]: 19 After having successfully attended the Institute of Fine Arts, he started specializing in renovation of old buildings and interior decoration. In 1897-1898 he worked with Raffaello Ojetti on the renovation of the Castello Orsini-Odescalchi in Bracciano for its owner, Prince Baldassarre Odescalchi.[2]: 19 In the early 1900s he worked on the decoration of the Roman churches of Santa Teresa and San Camillo de Lellis, both with Tullio Passarelli, and on stucco work in Santa Maria dei Miracoli.[2]: 21-22 In 1912, he teamed with Marcello Piacentini for the winning entry in a competition for the remodeling of Piazza Navona, which was however not implemented. In those years he operated from a spacious office in Palazzo dei Piceni in the center of Rome.[2]: 22 In 1917 he created stucco decoration in the Palazzo Chigi following its purchase by the Italian state.[2]: 38 Immediately after World War I he proposed a colossal memorial to the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, featured a cascade flanked by giant statues, that would have been carved on the nearby Pizzocco mountain.[2]: 23&25
In the early 1920s he worked with Giuseppe Volpi, then Governor of Tripolitania, on the remodeling of Tripoli. There he designed the Savings Bank Building (Palazzo della Cassa di Risparmio, now the country's central bank), the waterfront boulevard (Lungomare Conte Volpi, now Ad-dahra Al-kebira), the renovation of the Red Castle, and the memorial to the Italian conquest (Monumento ai Caduti e alla Vittoria).[3] In 1925-1926 he also produced the first master plan for the expansion of Tirana, where Italian influence was significant at the time. That plan was partly implemented, and elements of Brasini's design still exist in the layout of Skanderbeg Square and in the city's major north–south axis, now Dëshmorët e Kombit Boulevard.[4] In 1929 he was appointed a member of the newly created Royal Academy of Italy.
Brasini also designed sets and costumes for silent movies, including Theodora (1921) and Quo Vadis (1924).[5]: 122
Brasini had a lifelong interest in urban design. In 1925–27, he conceived a project for a remodeling of Rome's center dubbed the "Mussolini Forum" (Italian: Foro Mussolini) which would have entailed the demolition of much of the Campo Marzio, leaving the ancient monuments (Pantheon, Column of Marcus Aurelius, Obelisk of Montecitorio) standing alone in the midst of large urban spaces.[6]: 276-278 Brasini's emphasis on facilitating car traffic at the cost of the old city fabric has elicited comparisons with Le Corbusier's 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris, despite the obvious stylistic difference.[6]: 100 In 1927, he was commissioned by the Ministry of Public Education to design a master plan for the Flaminio neighborhood, on which he had already worked in 1915.[2]: 22, 26 In 1931, he participated in the committee for a new city plan of Rome (Commissione del Piano Regolatore di Roma),[2]: 26 and in 1934 he was a member of the jury for the Palazzo Littorio project that would have faced the Basilica of Maxentius across the Via dell'Impero (now Via dei Fori Imperiali).[6]
His prestige projects in Rome included, in the 1920s, the church of the Sacred Heart of Mary in Parioli and the sprawling Complesso del Buon Pastore on Via di Bravetta, and in the 1930s, the seat of Istituto nazionale per l'assicurazione contro gli infortuni sul lavoro buttressing Quirinal Hill, as well as the Ponte Flaminio. He also designed major public buildings in Southern Italy: the Palazzo del Podestà in Foggia (built between 1928 and 1932), and the massive Palazzo della Prefettura in Taranto (built from 1930 to 1934).
Brasini produced designs for a number of major projects that were never built. In 1931 he participated in the competition for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. In the 1930s he produced various designs for a colossal Mole Littoria in Rome, intended to celebrate Mussolini's imperial achievements and match Albert Speer's plans for Nazi Berlin. Mussolini did not approve the project, however, due to its high costs and competing projects of EUR. In 1939 he designed a new cathedral for Addis Ababa, and in 1956 a colossal lighthouse intended as a monument to Christianity in the Saxa Rubra neighborhood of Rome.[5]: 123
For the EUR, Brasini in 1938 designed a monumental Forestry Institute named after Alessandro Mussolini, Benito's father, whose construction started in 1940 but was suspended in 1942 for war reasons. The partly built structure was demolished in 1957 and replaced by the General House of the Marist Brothers, in spite of Brasini's attempts to promote alternative design options to save the construction.
Following World War II Brasini no longer received major commissions in Italy, but he remained involved in the completion of some of his projects, such as the Ponte Flaminio and the Parioli basilica. He produced plans for the city of Riyadh and a royal palace there, at the invitation of the government of Saudi Arabia (1954), and for a bridge over the Strait of Messina (1956-1963).[2]: 26 [5]: 123 He died in 1965 in the house he had designed for himself on Via Flaminia.
Paolo Portoghesi, while acknowledging the "undoubted architectural merits" of Brasini's designs, defines him as "one of the great misfits of twentieth-century architecture" for generally not being "in tune with the spirit of the times," but rather representing "a case of estrangement from that spirit."[7]
