In a new Wallpaper* summer series, 'Objectify', architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. This week, he's shining a light on the condominio, the residential solution that stood the test of time – and still tests us
Carlo Ratti on the condominio
This summer has not been easy for European holidaymakers. Temperatures through the roof. Wildfires across Spain, France and Italy. The EasyJet meltdown, with its nights on the floor at Gatwick. Still… It could have been worse. We could have been stuck in the city, cooped up inside a condominio, the shared apartment block where most Italians live.
Few people realise that the condominio is one of Italy’s most successful inventions, exported around the world. Its origins go back to the Casa di Diana, a second-century AD insula. While the patrician families spread horizontally through their opulent villas, the plebs went vertical. Floor upon floor, family upon family.
The success was immediate. In imperial Rome, the first city in history to pass the one-million-inhabitant mark, tens of thousands of insulae sprang up. Some reached seven or eight storeys, prompting Emperor Augustus to impose a height limit: a kind of proto-zoning code, introduced before urban planning even had a name.
But with the condominium came, alas, the condòmino: the neighbour. In his Third Satire, Juvenal explains why his friend Umbricius decided to leave Rome for Cumae: cracked walls, precarious buildings, fires and noisy neighbours. 'Quae meritoria somnum admittunt?' Meaning, 'which rented dwellings allow sleep?' History’s first condominium complaint has come down to us in hexameters.
Two thousand years later, same old story. The Sunday-morning drill, heels clattering on the floor above, the rowdy meeting to decide how to divvy up the cost of the roof. The French writer Georges Perec used just one Parisian apartment block to write Life: A User’s Manual. The Englishman J.G. Ballard, meanwhile, took a London tower block as his starting point for High-Rise, his chronicle of the unravelling of the social contract.
And yet the condominio has never stopped working. Stack enough people on top of one another, and you get urban density. You also get support, as demonstrated by the neighbourly solidarity of the Covid-19 years and the building concierge’s ever-reliable grapevine. Not to mention serendipity. Remember the Italian movie The Elevator? On the eve of Ferragosto, with the city deserted, a priest and a voluptuous woman find themselves trapped for hours in the building’s lift.
The condominio, in other words, distils a dichotomy as old as cities themselves. The longing to be together and the desire to flee. Integration and segregation. Like the Republic of Venice, which for centuries welcomed people from every corner of the Mediterranean, yet at the same time invented the ghetto, the quarter where Jews were locked in at night, on an island named after the foundry, or geto, that once stood there.
And so, even if this stifling tail end of summer is not going entirely to plan, let’s remember that things could be worse. 'Hell is other people,' wrote Sartre. Perhaps he too, one distant summer in the 1970s, found himself stuck without air conditioning in his condominio at 42 Rue Bonaparte in Paris.
About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti
Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: ‘Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?’ Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.
Carlo Ratti
Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: ‘objects should keep us company’. Especially during this scorching summer.