Architect Michael Gabellini remakes his grandfather's city--and breaks out of boutique design--with a dramatic new piazza.
By Jeffrey Hogrefe
New York--based Gabellini Associates is known for creating elegant, minimal, beautifully lit interiors that evoke the solemnity of ancient temples. (photo: Jimmy Cohrssen)
New York--based Gabellini Associates is known for creating elegant, minimal, beautifully lit interiors that evoke the solemnity of ancient temples. The firm's sumptuous Jil Sander showroom in Paris, located in a pristine white-limestone eighteenth-century hôtel particulier on the Avenue Montaigne, won an American Institute of Architects (AIA) award for excellence in 1993. Earlier this year, the firm received two other awards from the AIA: one for the red-walled Ultimo boutique in San Francisco, another for the Jil Sander boutique and showroom in Hamburg. It is easy to see why Michael Gabellini, 40, with his long, curly brown hair and tendency to dress all in black, has been pigeonholed by many as a fashion-business architect. Noted for an attention to detail that borders on the obsessive, Gabellini's icy interiors make perfect backdrops for high-end clothes and beautiful people.
But now his firm is being put to a test, designing a piazza in Verona, Italy, that will be used by large numbers of ordinary people every day. Gabellini has proposed turning the Piazza Isolo--a square in the center of the city currently occupied by a ratty bus station and a crowded open-air market--into a spectacle that would be suitable for a Jil Sander fashion show. The design was selected from 78 submissions to a competition sponsored by Instituto USA, an organization in New York that fosters Italian American cultural exchanges. Slated to begin construction next year, the piazza will feature an underground garage for 500 cars that combines water and light in the manner of an environmental sculpture.
The title of the Verona competition was "Palimpsest," a reference to the traces of history still visible at the site. Gabellini was inspired by the title to go deep into the area's past. The Piazza Isolo sits on land that was created with infill after a devastating flood in 1888 forced the city to redirect the Adige river. After rereading Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a favorite book of his, the architect decided to submerge the parking garage under the marketplace. He is also proposing to "bring the river back to the site" by placing the piazza in a shallow basin of filtered water above the garage. Thousands of glass pinholes cut into the surface of the piazza will allow light to pass through the layer of water underneath and into the garage. At night, the garage's electric lighting will illuminate the marketplace through the pinholes. The walls lining the garage will be made of stone and were designed to evoke muraglioni, the curved flood walls that have lined the banks of the Adige since the flood.
Gabellini's return to Verona--and to the banks of the Adige--has a personal significance that he still finds difficult to discuss. His grandfather, Giovanni Gabellini, was a stone carver who emigrated to the United States from Verona sometime after the flood. "He never told me stories about the flood," Gabellini says, "but I grew up with a sense of it having been a truly horrible thing."
"When people pass through the site they will think about what it was in the nineteenth century," says Livio Dimitri, the director of Instituto USA. "They will remember the stories their grandparents told them about the flood. In a way, the Gabellini project is a memory project. You know how dreadful it is to go in underground garages. Well, not in this case. This use of light filtered through water will make the light in the garage fantastic. I tend to stay away from the word 'romantic,' but the design has a very feminine sensibility--very diaphanous, very delicate, very thoughtful." This delicacy is hardly surprising, considering Gabellini's work in the fashion world. But will this fanciful design make for a functional garage?
The critics, certainly, are taking it seriously. Earlier this year, Architecture magazine gave the project a P/A award, which is given each year to young architects for promising unbuilt designs. Winning this award, which was established by the now-defunct magazine Progressive Architecture, has long been a rite of passage in the careers of major architects. Past recipients include Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, Rem Koolhaas, and Cesar Pelli, one of Gabellini's heroes. And if the Verona design is successfully implemented, it could vastly enhance the international reputation of his small Manhattan firm.
Piazza Isolo was ruined in the 1930s, when Mussolini erected a bus station there that obscured views of a twelfth-century church, a Roman amphitheater, and blocks of Renaissance buildings. The task set by the competition was to replace the bus station with parking for 500 cars. Before sitting down to redesign the piazza, Gabellini studied the buildings of the Italian Modernist Carlo Scarpa--who worked in Verona until the 1980s--to see the way a talented architect responded to Renaissance and medieval architecture. He visited all of the city's Roman structures, from the ancient forum of Piazza Bra to the aqueduct and amphitheater. "This is a city that has built upon itself time and again," says Gabellini. "It has always built on the existing Roman city and the way it was set up. In terms of proportion, it has always changed in accordance with the elastic quality of life. To me, it is one of the most beautiful cities in Italy. There is a historical richness and personality in the streets."
The result of Gabellini's research is a clean, light urban design that honors the square's complex history. Gabellini's Manhattan interiors, many of which were constructed inside landmarked buildings, have taught him how to minimize the potential clash between the traditional and the contemporary. In fact, one of the central virtues of minimalism is that if done right it adds little to the built environment except grace notes. Gabellini's design works not by transforming Verona, but by revealing it.
At first glance, the project seems rather self-effacing in its simplicity. Yet there is an unmistakable grandeur to it. While the garage, intended mainly as a solution to Verona's severe parking shortage, is hidden underground, Gabellini would like it to serve as a kind of art gallery, an installation space for artists who work in light and glass, such as James Turrell and Roni Horn. His hope is that the garage will do for parking at the end of the twentieth century what Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, did for parking in the middle of the century: Turn it into the main event.
The son of John Gabellini, an interior designer who was also a Sunday painter, Michael Gabellini was born in 1958 in Vera Cruz, Pennsylvania, outside Allentown. A driven student, Michael entered the Rhode Island School of Design in the fall of 1976 with thoughts of becoming an environmental sculptor in the tradition of Turrell and Robert Smithson. He spent his first two years at RISD conceiving earthworks that were never realized. He changed his major to architecture because he was attracted to the way it was taught at RISD, and frustrated by the instruction he had been receiving in sculpture. Gabellini continues to see himself primarily as an artist who works with architecture rather than as a conventional architect, a distinction that he does not take lightly.
"It wasn't the case that I wanted to produce something practical," Gabellini tells me when I ask him if he went from fine arts to applied arts for that reason. "It was more about proportion. In architecture I was able to work with space and light in ways that interested me as an artist." Gabellini often talks about his interiors as projects in which he "carves space out of light." Rodolfo Machado, a partner in the Boston firm of Machado and Silvetti and one of the judges on the P/A awards committee, taught Gabellini at RISD. He remembers Gabellini as "one of those rare, gifted students who only come along now and then. He had an incredible eye and sense of form and taste, which is difficult to teach."
Unlike many of his peers, Gabellini was never attracted to Post-Modernism and often refers disdainfully to its pastiche of historical styles as "patchwork." He received a degree in fine arts from RISD in 1980 and a B.Arch., also from RISD, in 1981. He also took classes at the Architectural Association in London and conducted independent research on historical buildings in Rome. He began his career as an architect on a traditional Howard Roarkian track: From 1982 to 1986 he apprenticed for Kohn, Pedersen & Fox (KPF), one of the New York--based firms that specialize in modern skyscrapers. During that time, he worked under William Louie, a KPF partner, on 1235 Avenue of the Americas, a late-Modernist gem built by the Minskoff family on the corner of 53rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas behind the Hilton Hotel.
"I enjoyed working with Michael because he was always willing to explore things," says Louie. "He is very quiet, very understated, very serious, very intense. I don't know whether the architecture we were pursuing at that time was his thing. But he had good ideas. He has a fantastic hand. Before I knew it, he was a pretty famous guy." Gabellini worked on both the interiors and exteriors of buildings for KPF. Gene Kohn, one of the firm's founding partners, says that he later tried to talk Gabellini into returning to KPF to head up the company's interior design department. "But by then Michael was already established on his own and did not want to return to a big firm," says Kohn.
While at KPF, Gabellini began to work on freelance projects with Jay Smith, an interior designer for fashion companies. Although Smith was not formally trained as an architect, Gabellini considers him one of his principal mentors because he had an "innate sense of light and space." The two collaborated on a project for fashion designer Linda Dresner on Park Avenue. The space, which was completed in 1984, was featured in New York magazine next to Michael Graves' Post-Modern interior for Diane Von Furstenberg's shop in the nearby Sherry Netherland Hotel. Gabellini and Smith's pared-down solution was presented in contrast to Graves' extravagant one. "They made a story out of this 'iceberg space,' as they described it," recalls Gabellini, "this abstract white box you didn't know what was supposed to happen in and then this warm and fuzzy Post-Modern space."
In 1987, Gabellini moved to Italy, where he acquired a familiarity with the Italian landscape that would later help him to envision the Verona proj-ect. There he also learned to carve in stone from the celebrated masons of Pietrasanta, a Tuscan town near Carrara. (He has since contracted many of those same artisans to manufacture fixtures for his interiors.) Gabellini also attended exhibitions of works by Arte Povera artists, whose simple use of light and material appealed greatly to him. He was especially impressed by the Panza Collection of minimalist art in Varese. Shortly after returning to New York, he founded Gabellini Associates in a small office on Union Square in Lower Manhattan.
Gabellini does not view designing interiors for the fashion industry as a lesser calling than designing big buildings. When I come to see him, he appears to have given this matter a great deal of thought. He has prepared a fairly lengthy analysis of his own career, which he delivers in a rambling monologue that goes on for the better part of an hour. (Gabellini has an elliptical manner of speaking that is highly evocative but sometimes incomprehensible.) To hear Gabellini tell it, everything he has done has led to the Piazza Isolo.
"For me, what is wonderful about the Verona project is that it brings everything together," Gabellini says. "I went from KPF where I built big and understood big--understood how a big building fits into its environment--to working with Jay Smith and working very small in this kind of jewel-box, Alice in Wonderland world. Now I feel like I am able to get down and dirty again like I did at KPF and put space together in a very sculptural, flexible, and elemental way." He says that in Verona he is "taking space apart and putting it back together so you are thinking about space volumetrically." What he means by this is that he has recast the volume of the garage so that it doesn't feel like you're underground. At one point, he tells me that he does not regard a garage any differently than he does a bathroom. He observes that both are spaces that architects tend to scorn as necessary evils. "I took the generic idea of a garage, which is always a space to be avoided," he says, "and carved out a space so that you feel like you are on a terrace with water over you."
A shy, almost ascetic character, Gabellini has an unhurried air that seems out of place in his busy office--especially now that the firm has moved on to large-scale projects like Verona. At a recent meeting in his office, which occupies the rear of a loft, he tells me that he entered the Verona competition "on a lark." When I ask Carmen Carrasco, an associate in the firm who has worked closely with Gabellini on the project, if she has also read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, she laughs and says, "Only Michael has the time to read." Gabellini is also the only architect in the firm who seldom uses a computer to draw or communicate; he believes fervently in the primacy of drawing by hand.
Not that Gabellini is a complete Luddite. He is alert to the advantages of technology; he had his photographs of Verona generated into a series of computer montages.
"A part of our project is engaging in physical space rather than in a kind of abstraction through drawing," Gabellini says. "For me, it is a very immediate process to really have a specific sense of a place in terms of light and air. The whole history of Verona's water creates a very physical sensation when you are there.
"The removal of the water from the piazza is something I wanted to convey in my design," he continues. "I felt that turning the piazza into a bus station and marketplace prevented that part of the city from growing in a positive way. It actually declined. Bus stations bring in a kind of unhealthy transient life. So for me the project became a celebration of a history that had been lost. It was a way to remind inhabitants of the loss. . ."
As wonderful as it may sound to have a garage with a water-and-light show in the center of a historic Italian city, there is no precedent for Gabellini's design. In fact, many of the finer points of its execution are still being worked out. (Rodolfo Machado, who has been watching the project closely, is confident that it will be realized because, he says, "Italians can build anything if they want to badly enough.")
What will the garage be like in February when it is cold and gray outside? Gabellini intends to heat the water in the pools, as Robert Smithson did in an environmental sculpture called Steam Field; the effect will be to create fog in the piazza. To prevent excessive moisture from building up in the interior--where water from above will be allowed to seep down over certain walls--he plans to use dehumidifiers. He believes that the water running over the stones in the interior will keep their surfaces clean. And if there are traffic back-ups caused by people who drive through just to see the garage, Gabellini remarks that in Italy, "Traffic equals culture."
Billie Tsien, a partner in the New York firm of Tod Williams Billie Tsien and one of the judges on the panel that gave Gabellini Associates the P/A award, says she's "looking forward to driving a little car around in that garage." She seems almost in awe of what Gabellini has accomplished with this design. "A garage is such an unglamorous project to attack. It's so easy to just take the garage consultant's plan and jab it in there and close your eyes and pretend that everything occurs above ground," Tsien says.
"It is much harder to try to reconsider the possibility of what you do with cars and how you make it part of the total experience and how you make it humane and possibly even beautiful."
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