There are many different attitudes towards the historic preservation and renovation work that is becoming increasingly central to the work of architecture. In America, we tend to either tear down historic structures or restore them to within an inch of their lives. In Asia, they prefer to replicate. In Europe, and especially in Italy, they layer. A country with such a long history of construction cannot not help but keep adding to that structures that might have started in the Roman period or even earlier and then found new life—perhaps first in the Middle Ages or in the Renaissance, and then in the 19th century, and again in the early 20th century, and now once more for our current millennium. The grace with which these Italian designers do this is the mark of an architecture of interpretation, reuse, insertion, and inventive elaboration that I believe is key to how we all should husband our resources so that we can make great architecture.
Few buildings have more history than the Uffizi Gallery Museum in Florence. Under the direction of Giorgio Vasari (starting in 1560), it was originally built, or rather cobbled together and unified, as the new offices (hence the name) of the Florentine city-state. Since then, the complex has been expanded, renovated, and repurposed to become one of the largest and most-visited art museums in the world. Recent additions have included a rather bombastic and over-scaled 2011 staircase, designed by Adolfo Natalini, and a rehanging of the most popular rooms, those housing works by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. There, the designers have worked to frame the focus of popular adoration in a way that allows more people to enjoy them, while protecting the works. One new “layer” left unfinished, however, is the long-mooted renovation of the exit and public areas designed by Arata Isozaki in 1998—which is still on hold for reasons that stem from political and aesthetic resistance to cost overruns and fears of disturbing ruins underground.
This summer, one of the architects of the current rehang, Nicola Santini, led a group that included my students from the School of Architecture at Taliesin and me past the crowds and through a back door into one of the most beautiful architecture palimpsests in the complex: the offices and reading room of the graphic study collection. Housing more than 180,000 documents that a thousand-plus scholars a year consult, the collection is off the tourist track. Originally renovated by Carlo Scarpa, Giovanni Michelucci, and Ignazio Gardella for the current use, the offices are located in one of Vasari’s wings that had been rebuilt in the 17th century to designs by architect Bernardo Buontalenti, and they have just undergone a $1 million renovation headed by Uffizi architect Antonio Godoli with Santini and Pier Paolo Taddei of Avatar Architettura.
The Scarpa-led design of 1954 was part of a larger project, whose most public part was the so-called Gallery of the Primitives, the display area for early medieval art. There, visitors can still see parts of Scarpa’s work, especially the metal claws that hold up the paintings and a cross that tilts towards and hovers over you, while metal rods suspend other works and thin railings keep you at bay.
Step into the offices, the first few of which have not yet been renovated, and you see the more mundane and delicate aspect of what Scarpa and his collaborator there, Edoardo Detti, envisioned. Walls and ceilings become planes sliced apart by thin metal strips, coat hooks resemble (and perhaps are) repurposed yachting hardware, and desks are compositions of elements, each one defined as a separate volume or plane, that organize and compact the ritual of work in a manner that you can see as well as use.
If the attitude of Scarpa’s work was one of incision and focused addition of expressive elements, Godoli and Avatar have chosen to create a cocoon that abstracts and heightens the sense of being in an integrated environment. The tall spaces are covered above, below, and around you with various versions of oak slats, slabs, and veneer. Even the tables, wired to accept and facilitate electronic work, are wood constructions framing a leather top, and the chairs are of the same material. The rest of the Uffizi might be all hard surfaces and grandeur, but this is a place of intimacy and warmth.
The most felicitous use of oak is in the very closely spaced slats that cover the bookcases where the library’s rare volumes reside. The architects left the original cases in place, only cleaning them up and sealing them, and then replaced the heavy glass doors with rows of lighter-colored vertical elements whose lengths vary from one case to the next. Through the scrim version of the wood planes that cover the rest of the walls, you see the books, reminding you of the layers of the past that were in place here.
Though it would seem as if the spaces of the library are all new, the thinness of the wood and the way the materials and the forms turn the essence of what was already there into an environment that is both new and appears to float within the building that surrounds it makes you feel as if you have come into a set of spaces that lets you experience the character of what has been built up all around you over the centuries.
The architects are now proceeding around the rest of the Uffizi, inserting, clearing up, clarifying, and creating a sense of making what is there available. They are doing so room by room, sometimes even painting by painting. At some point a new set of public entrance and exit spaces, as well as room to accommodate the crowds as they try to make their pilgrimage around the Uffizi’s treasures, will be necessary. Until then, however, let us enjoy architecture whose incisiveness and clarification lets both us and these venerable old buildings breathe.
