Teatro India, Roma: hortus conclusus in terrain vague

The India Theatre in Rome is «a secret, mysterious, place in the interior of the city» (Mario Martone): an original interpretation of a humanistic hortus conclusus, fulfilled in a terrain vague of the most ancient industrial area of Rome, that was arranged along the Tiber’s banks, close to the railway and near to the ancient town center. In 1899 a company for recycling waste materials (Società prodotti chimici colle e concimi), that were produced by near abattoir, built on the right bank the brick edifices of its factory. Roman engineer Giulio Filippucci designed the architectures according to a beautiful new-Romanesque style, that was inspired by an excellent knowledge of the Art&Craft’s tradition. In 1918 a Turinese chemical company (Reale Manifattura di saponi e candele steariche Fratelli Lanza) purchased the plant and increased it. The activity stopped in 1952; atthe end of XXth century many buildings were demolished for the purpose of a profitable estate speculation. In 1999 the municipality of Rome acquired two buildings in the south-east compartment of the area. They were allocated to the establishment of a branch of Argentina Theater, whose eighteenth-century architecture is unfit for avant-garde plays and performing arts. Giuseppe De Boni and Ugo Colombari developped a polished urban renewal design, that balances conservation of ancient buildingsand free recoursing to industrial design. In 2004 the trans-avant-gard artist Mimmo Paladino produced indoor and outdoor setsketches for Sofocle’s Edipo a Colono, directed by Mario Martone. Its external works were preserved for finishing the building project. The connections among outdoor and indoor spaces, environment and people, private and public functions, acting and visual arts characterize the India Theatre as a suggestive transitional architecture. A no-place was transformed into an urban facility by a spatial continuity that allows several interactions of individual and collective uses, feelings and aesthetic perceptions. Its particular location is out of common stereotypes about Rome. The lonely natural environment of river banks and the industrial vestiges create many crossed cultural evocations in a well-defined architectonic- artistic design.