Corviale, a one-kilometer residential complex in Rome

https://www.archdaily.com/956906/corviale-a-one-kilometer-residential-complex-in-rome

by thunderbong • 4 years ago

142 107 4 years ago

cgeier• 4 years ago

You can find it here on google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/00148+Corviale+Metropolita...

WilTimSon• 4 years ago

First thing I thought of was how much of a nightmare this would be for food delivery and general navigation for anyone, who isn't familiar with the building. Otherwise, kind of a curious idea, though I don't think I'd want to live in one. Always preferred more compact buildings.

agilob• 4 years ago

Can't imagine being there in lockdown for months

logifail• 4 years ago

Can't imagine being there in lockdown for months

We are friends with two separate Italian families who struggled with Covid lockdowns.

The first family live in Florence and were stuck in a tiny apartment with two young girls and weren't even allowed to use their building's communal (but private) garden. Fresh air was to be found only on their balcony.

The second family live in central Milan, and on the announcement of the first lockdown, fled to an extended family member's house in the countryside, far from the city. The parents described it to the (young) kids as "the unexpected holiday". They ended up ordering toys and bicycles online once it turned out the lockdown wasn't just going to be a couple of weeks.

My primary concern about our overall response to Covid is that next time around - and there will definitely be a next time - there will be substantially more suspicion (and hence less compliance), and that doesn't end well.

goodpoint• 4 years ago

If anything it's much easier.

sushimako• 4 years ago

Similarly, there is the "Karl Marx Hof"; a social housing complex in Vienna that was completed in 1930 and spans 1.1km, with a huge park in its midst.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Hof

https://goo.gl/maps/E1PvcZahSPVjk4RY9

patricktlo• 4 years ago

Great video on it: https://youtu.be/vzGnyqpvwG8

thriftwy2• 4 years ago

Compared to the Soviet approach to housing this is not entirely impressive.

Take, for example, more than one "round houses" with around 200m diameter of one building.

https://yandex.ru/maps/org/krugly_dom_na_nezhinskoy/70861302...

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

Reminds me of the Apple Spaceship campus.

thriftwy2• 4 years ago

Only several decades earlier. This one is surrounded by six school buildings and three kindergardens (of course there are some other apartment buildings there as well).

Like a CPU that is surrounded by a troop of supporting chips.

I wonder which schools do kids of Corviale attend. Around it I can see all kind of stuff but only one school. Do they all fit?

Despite being a huge apartment complex, it seems very car-centric.

skybrian• 4 years ago

Odd that it's so euphemistic about the people living there. Seems like there should be interviews?

Trombone12• 4 years ago

That would be a research project in the architectural world, archdaily is more content-from-a-distance type publication.

kgeist• 4 years ago

The building on the photo reminds me of the "lying skyscraper" in Moscow (0.7 km): https://9gag.com/gag/a8MQwNp

flandish3• 4 years ago

As a firefighter, I can’t imagine trying to get ladders or an aerial into those middle sections, should it be needed.

I hope a diff angle would show easier access.

newaccount2021• 4 years ago

the building is literally right beside a road, just park your truck where you need to put up the ladder...

not that anyone in Rome would want you to put out a fire there, I'm sure they are all praying an earthquake will relieve them of this brutalist masterpiece

jasonwatkinspdx4• 4 years ago

I'd hazard a guess that a professional fire fighter is better at judging the challenges here than rando hnews posters... so perhaps you could ask for what you're missing instead of being so dismissive?

worik• 4 years ago

Can you not just park a truck in the road? How is it different from a normal ten (?) story building?

Do you need 360 degree access?

frosted-flakes• 4 years ago

There are interior courtyards that presumably cannot be accessed by truck.

flandish3• 4 years ago

Sort of. Your “max” vertical reach eventually puts your ladder / tower truck too close to the building. Either for collapse or other reasons.

Re 360 - no and yes. Someone will always do a full building walkaround. But I was thinking more of the interior corridor.

omnibrain• 4 years ago

Reminds me of the "Unité d'habitation"

A few years ago, we visited (the fields of) Verdun and stayed in Briey. A medium size (~5000p) village in the middle between Metz and Verdun. While driving we overlooked the fields and saw this huge out of place futuristic building. That's how I learned of the "Unité d'habitation". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d%27habitation

squarefoot• 4 years ago

Being myself from Rome, I know that complex and have been several times there in the past, also in the late 90s knew a girl who lived there. That's a place you definitely don't want to roam alone in the night.

stevenwoo• 4 years ago

How much bigger is this than the Haussmann style buildings in Paris and Barcelona?

TacticalCoder• 4 years ago

About twice as high but incredibly larger. Hausmannian buildings have at most six stories which, IMO, is already one or two too many. But really Hausmann's style is elaborated, not brutalist.

Another complete afterthought is the gigantic shadow these monsters do cast. In some cities they brought entire neighbourhoods into shadow during the day.

Such buildings are just sad and reflect the minds of their creators (and of those who rooted/root for them).

cavanhorn• 4 years ago

This already reminded me of Pruitt-Igoe BEFORE I read this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe

jsnell• 4 years ago

One more in the same theme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora

What I've never understood with these projects is, what's the supposed benefit of a single stupidly large building over a large number of reasonably sized ones? It doesn't feel like this would bring any meaningful economies of scale to the building process. It seems unlikely to actually use land more efficiently.

Like, is it really just some kind of an authoritarian fetish for giant projects, or was there at least some attempt at justifying it?

bombcar• 4 years ago

If you’re a politician or other approver you want something big and bold to put your name on. Authorizing building a bunch of normal buildings is boring - anyone could do that!

pmontra• 4 years ago

Nobody lost an election because they were inspired by Le Corbusier. But they should.

nwatson• 4 years ago

Also here, last photo https://www.google.com/amp/s/bernadetealves.com/2020/06/12/u... , the 700-meter Minhocão (Big Worm) at UnB (Universidade Nacional de Brasília). I started EE program there in 1984 before deciding to move to the USA (student/teacher strikes were gonna lead to lost semesters). Going between classes was real inconvenient.

IshKebab4• 4 years ago

Yeah I can't see much point either. I think it's just one of those things architects and urban planners do sometimes because it's interesting and unusual, not because it's good.

Another example is guided busways. Inferior to a road in every respect but that isn't enough to stop them.

I guess I shouldn't single out architects and urban planners - probably every field has projects that a back of the envelope calculation shows are obviously a terrible idea but they go ahead anyway. Solar roadways. Space based power.

The issue with architects doing it is that buildings stick around for a long time and people have to actually live in them, so I feel justified in reserving special resentment for modern architects.

hutzlibu6• 4 years ago

"probably every field has projects that a back of the envelope calculation shows are obviously a terrible idea but they go ahead anyway. Solar roadways"

Solar roadways for example are only a terrible idea, as long as sturdy solar panels remains expensive, and there is lots of other unused area to be covered much more cheaply. That might change one day, but yes, until then it is an idea from people who are too lazy to do the basic math.

wardedVibe• 4 years ago

If you haven't read "Seeing like a State" I think you would find it quite interesting. There was a period where urban planners thought that they could, starting from first principles, design the perfect urban environment. It wasn't just authoritarians doing it, but those were the places most able to continue to execute on a vision and disregard the pushback.

marci• 4 years ago

What do you mean by efficiency of land usage?

The only thing I could think of is surface area and, compared to "a large number of reasonably sized ones", this obviously would be more efficient.

I see them as skyscrappers in landscape mode.

retube• 4 years ago

"The Line" has entered the chat

ronsor• 4 years ago

"The Line" has been kicked for wasting billions of dollars.

groestl• 4 years ago

Also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Hof

codewiz• 4 years ago

In Japan, clusters of identical buildings were constructed around the same period of Corviale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danchi

These communities also didn't age too well, becoming associated with aging population, urban degradation and poor architecture.

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

The renovated ones are pretty nice (and cheap!) to live in. At least assuming you can stand living in such a building in the first place.

jasonwatkinspdx4• 4 years ago

This was one of the big failures of modernism and related architectural schools.

Being charitable, the thinking at the time was somewhat mechanistic: that you could build utopic urban environments from first principles as massive campuses vs individual buildings.

Inevitable these projects underestimated the organic and evolutionary complexity of urban environments. No single design team organized by some maestro can come close to anticipating and designing around all the needs of an urban neighborhood.

But on the other hand, these mega projects were a simple story to sell politically. Look, we're being bold and thinking big, we're going to actually address problems in housing supply vs kicking the can down the road, etc. Someone else saying they needed to think in terms of flexible zoning and a variety of tax incentives looks not nearly so compelling.

Today we look back on these projects differently, because the failure of "housing projects" in the US, UK, and elsewhere are a familiar meme almost, so people are much more skeptical about mega projects working out.

ghaff• 4 years ago

One interesting aspect of how many people view urban planning is that a lot of urbanists like to point to the like of Jane Jacobs who (correctly IMO) opposed a lot of centralized planning, especially with respect to roads. At the same time, she favored organic and community-oriented development which I suspect a lot of people today would consider NIMBY and would mostly be opposed to large-scale housing developments. She did live in the West Village after all.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

I don't buy the failure narrative at all. In a lot of Eastern European and also to an extent Western European cities large housing projects work reasonably well especially for lower income households, they've kept rents affordable, they're energy efficient and they aided in rapid urbanisation.

Many of them don't look great but they pretty much did their job given the limited resources that a lot of cities had available.

If you look at modernist cities around the world, in India for example as well, cities that took inspiration from this kind of planning have generally good standards of living, costs, little homelessness and decent environmental footprints.

usrusr2• 4 years ago

The thinking at the time was driven by greenery: you take the early industrial urban density that was a lifeless (except for humans) city of stone, but stack the humans a few times higher to open up room for trees and birds and perhaps a little pond. Everybody gets their own window to nature, as if they had a cabin in the woods! That's how their reasoning went, but humans aren't that easy to fool.

scotty792• 4 years ago

No single design team organized by some maestro can come close to anticipating and designing around all the needs of an urban neighborhood.

This is also true about people who designed american urban sprawl.

forgotusername6• 4 years ago

In less hospitable climates this kind of giant building has its place. No need to go outside in the freezing cold or scorching heat.

ksherlock• 4 years ago

In Whittier Alaska, (pop: 275-300 or so), most folks live in the Begich Towers which was a former Army building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittier,_Alaska

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begich_Towers

rob74• 4 years ago

Well, if you are going to try to build affordable housing quickly, such large projects are the way to go. At least in the sixties and seventies city planners in the "western world" tried to do it (with more or less success), today they're not even trying anymore.

A more successful example is the former Munich Olympic Village (https://goo.gl/maps/1HTQWvGcRcoXAWvH6). It's composed of 3 streets which are completely built over, so the cars at ground level are hidden from view and the pedestrians are walking in a completely pedestrian area at level 2 (I think). The buildings are also very linear and all look the same, but all apartments have huge south-facing terraces with lots of greenery (including shrubs or even trees). Public transport connection is also very good with a subway station nearby. Today the apartments are very sought after - wish they had built more projects like this. But if you look at more recent projects, like the "Messestadt Riem" (https://goo.gl/maps/tVrahc4uDFkijGCC9), they are much more cramped and spread out over a larger surface, with squat buildings that look very interchangeable - not really better, I'm afraid.

usrusr2• 4 years ago

Isn't that exactly was gp was asking about? Why shape a big project like one huge monolith, if you could also try to disguise the size? Munich Olympic Village is all about appearing human-scale despite its size, Corviale makes its hugeness the core of its identity.

More-nitors• 4 years ago

hm I thought they were to impress people... show off "we can build this in one-go" / "we can compensate/take this big-land from the owners in one-go"

In construction, you have to have the timing right for the whole building in one-go...

In land-ownership issue, you have to own the whole land / negotiate with/seize from with owners who own some of the land

euroderf• 4 years ago

cars at ground level are hidden from view and the pedestrians are walking in a completely pedestrian area at level 2 (I think)

Helsinki tries to do the same in an area called Merihaka. I don't like it. Feels "off". The lower (car+transit) level feels like the Morlocks in The Time Machine, or some other kind of sci-fi dystopia, and the upper level has weird entryways to the netherworld and no real grid of "streets" (or whatever) for locating buildings and also some trees (in big planters, one presumes) and how can you have healthy, respected trees that are more or less suspended in mid-air, disconnected from the Earth ?

hankman86• 4 years ago

These buildings are basically an anti-individualism ideology, cast in concrete. Which is why far left and far right regimes alike like to erect such structures.

And it’s not even a thing of the past. In its most recent incarnation, the German Greens have declared war on single family homes. The fashionable justification being their carbon footprint. Instead, they are for policies to house people in apartment blocks that are densely spaced within cities instead of suburbs. Often while mixing different demographics that would not normally like to live within the same neighbourhood. Suffice it to say that people continue to pursue the dream of owning houses on their own plot of land.

ohyoutravel• 4 years ago

This sounds like a speech you rehearsed for a San Francisco HOA meeting to keep more housing out of your neighborhood to keep your property values up.

ajsnigrutin• 4 years ago

If you live in (or near) a city center, you'll live in a large apartment building. If you want a single family house, you move outside the city center. You cannot have an urban city environment, with restaurants, bars, stores and walkable streets if you only have single family buildings with yards there.

There is a place for everything, houses and large buildings.

Otherwise, I agree with the comment above, that such buildings seem impractical, and can be replaced with separate buildings, even higher, with open space in between them (and greens and parks and benches,...), eg: https://goo.gl/maps/TneCupaRNq3SgQYL7 (imagine this, but with undeground parking instead of cars parked on the steet).

8note• 4 years ago

I agree insofar as it actually involves people being in constructed environments. Houses are an anti-individualism ideology in all their forms. The only individualistic people are the homeless, who heat themselves with their own body, and and cover themselves only with what they can bring with them on their person.

To rely on wood and concrete to protect you is the death of self reliance

wesapien• 4 years ago

Thanks for not ignoring that tyranny can come from both the left and right. The left has done a job on everyone by sugarcoating far left sins. They have used Hitler and Nazism to paint anyone who is not in their ingroup. This includes people who are just anti-authoritarian in general.

ArchitectAnon• 4 years ago

It’s nothing to do with imposing ‘far left’ ideology. It’s physics. A dense urban neighbourhood of uninsulated housing that supports most trips by walking and public transport is more energy efficient than a passvihaus located somewhere that requires driving. Once built that suburban house has an ongoing and high transportation energy cost for maybe hundreds of years. Obviously if your political ideology is Green you are against wasting energy.

_ph_2• 4 years ago

No, the Greens have not declared war on single family homes. That was just the right-wing pitch on the observation by a green politician, that inside dense city regions, there is not enough real estate for single-family houses and that multi-unit houses have a way better energy balance.

If you live in a more rural region, feel free to have single-family houses. With an energy-efficient building style and rooftop-solar, that should be very environmently friendly. That is, if you don't waste too much energy commuting.

In and directly around cities, there is a huge scarcity of space for buildings and a shortage of homes. Having more dense units is both socially and environmentally friendly.

vl• 4 years ago

In reality this is not different from any densely urbanized suburb. It doesn't mater if this is one "long building" or several building that have small gaps between them. You want cheaper, dense housing, you are going to run into similar issues.

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

I dunno, I like it. It would be normally impossible to do something like this. The forest or rules surrounding something this massive would normally make it a fools errant.

Or maybe that’s why they make it so huge. Only need to deal with all the permits once.

renewiltord• 4 years ago

To appreciate it, you need to prefer housing people over aesthetics. But that's not for everyone.

bee_rider2• 4 years ago

I guess the utilities wouldn’t have to deal with weather so much, so that is cool.

It is sort of funny, not many people complain about skyscrapers but they are similarly excessive. Think of it as 200m taller than the Burj Khalifa, just sideways and fewer stars I bet.

We’re just a bunch of apes that like to mess with our environment, inventing a new type of environment is in our nature.

scotty792• 4 years ago

Lower amount of outside walls = lower maintenance?

ignoramous• 4 years ago

Bombay (a city in India) is pursuing at least 2 large scale cluster development projects for housing owing to its very high density. It remains to be seen how it pans out. Previously, such clusters have only been realised for economic zones / business districts.

reillyse• 4 years ago

I think this is amazing. Not every attempt to solve housing problems will be a hit but we have to try or else we’ll never succeed. Hopefully the next round of solutions will learn from these attempts.

I will say that it might seem contradictory but really high density housing with adequate services (grocery,medical,school) is actually lower impact than huge sprawl. Sure the impact on that one kilometer is dramatic but in a suburban sprawl situation the land use for the same number of residences/units is going to be orders of magnitude higher. Even the transport links might use more land than the the land used. I’m thinking large city streets and freeways, that’s a lot of real estate.

onecommentman• 4 years ago

An old saying goes that it is better to be a doctor than an architect. A doctor buries their mistakes, but all an architect can do is recommend their client plant ivy.

This might be a fine application for immersive IT on the grandest scale. Provide the fully complete 24-hour sensory experience of actually living in, or next to, one of these monuments to oversized municipal egos before the first shovel touches the dirt. Use IT to determine if the benefits match the (simulated) lived reality…before the City has an ugly, dysfunctional 50+ year problem on its hands.

And have the members of the current Community themselves provide an evaluation of whether the project as simulated meets their wants and needs, and not just the needs and wants of the City Council, builders or architects. There would have been a lot fewer Brutalist buildings and high-rise urban renewal housing projects built, if such an accurate immersive simulation had been available in the 50s-60s.

Such a simulation is probably beyond the capabilities of this generation of IT professionals. It would be a very hard job to model the diversity of residents, situations, environments, future economic scenarios, etc. over the lifetime of the proposed large building. Validating the QoL of the simulated environment would be even harder. (Maybe start with known failures and see if the simulation predicts the observed issues.) But if the QoL impact of large projects can’t be properly assessed, maybe smaller, more human-scaled projects are the responsible approach. Sprawl or no.

mertd• 4 years ago

Reminds me of The Line, the city Saudis claim to be building.

epolanski2• 4 years ago

They don't claim it, they started building it.

Anyway looking Arab countries is like looking at everything that's wrong with modern world.

Imagine being so rich you can build any kind of city and you choose to build Dubais, Dohas and this line.

You could literally build fascinating Arabian-style fascinating cities that would make a Disney movie look bad...and they decide to create such non sense monsters like palm islands (not practical, doomed to be sunk by raising oceans moreover) or lines in the desert, pointless skyscrapers in places where there's no lack of horizontal space, this ain't Manhattan ffs.

alchemist1e9• 4 years ago

Have you been to any of those places?

_ph_2• 4 years ago

In that region, a large connected complex makes a lot of sense due to the climatic conditions. You can have one large cooled complex where you can travel without leaving the air conditioned area. Also, transport alternatives to cars become more attractive.

baq• 4 years ago

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falowiec in Poland.

ithkuil• 4 years ago

And we have our own version of this in Croatia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamutica

cm2187• 4 years ago

Don't do to other what you don't want done to you. I wonder how many architects actually live in those monstruosities.

maurits• 4 years ago

Geneva has Le Lignon. 1.1km, 6,000+ residents. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Lignon

chris_va• 4 years ago

It's amazing how much influence Le Corbusier had on his contemporaries, and how that can live on to impact so many people.

... and, given the acid test of history, how terrible designs really were. Thus exacerbating the very thing they were trying to improve. *

*my subjective take

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

This was featured in Warrior of the Lost World, a very bad Mad Max style Italian film. One of my favorite MST3K episodes.

Mistletoe• 4 years ago

Oh I’ve got to go find that episode. I haven’t seen that one!

galfarragem• 4 years ago

Another one in the same theme (850m) in Gdansk, Poland: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falowiec

gaza3g• 4 years ago

Singapore has one, about 300m, with residents in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlS-sRorMCU

Corviale, a one-kilometer residential complex in Rome

Related Stories