URL originale : https://books.openedition.org/inha/12744
The documentation concerning hospitals and schools in the ANMI archives
Hôpitaux et écoles dans les archives de l’ANMI
p. 129-137
Texte intégral
1The Archives of the projects completed by ANMI (Associazione Nazionale per Soccorrere i Missionari Italiani - National Association for the Assistance of Italian Missionaries) in the years 1890-1940 are kept in the organization’s headquarters in Rome.1 The files contain a variety of documents making it possible to follow the projects step by step, from their design to completion, and, in some cases, their restoration. Founded in 1887 in Florence, ANMI was the most important promoter of Italian works in the Middle East and Northern Africa (with the exception of Libya)2 until the outbreak of World War II. In 1920, due to the large number of facilities to be built, the Association found it necessary to establish two technical design offices, one in Turin and the other in Rhodes (in the Eastern Dodecanese, occupied by Italy 1912-1940). The latter was active until 1925, at least. ANMI mainly planned school and hospital buildings.3 The materials archived in Rome, transferred from the Turin premises when the organization moved its headquarters, are extremely interesting, as they document in detail a large collection of projects. The first school and hospital buildings were designed by the missionary fathers, who also supervised the construction, collaborating closely with the Association. A constant increase in the number of projects to be carried out led to the creation of technical offices for the development of blueprints. At the same time, architects and engineers were appointed to supervise the work. After a preliminary visit to the project area, they developed ideas in Italy and then supervised their implementation, engaging in ongoing correspondence with various partners (the Association president, the building surveyor, the building contractor, the staff of the institute). This was a way of creating a wide network of expertise, in which the technical director managed to oversee the construction works even from a distance. Blueprints drawn up by architects abroad were submitted to the technical director and the staff of engineers in Italy, who then sent them back along with their observations. The archive documents attest to a gradual transfer of skills: professionals who worked with the association regularly, such as Carlo Buscaglione, Piero Molli, and Giulio and Antonio Barluzzi, had already gained experiences in Italy and abroad when they took on ANMI’s projects. Carlo Buscaglione, director of the Turin technical office from 1923 to 1940, is the architect who designed most of the buildings.
Figure 1: Boys’ school, Mansoura, Egypt (1928), Carlo Buscaglione, eng. Del Core, cont.: General view

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
Figure 2: Boys’ school, Mansoura, Egypt (1928), Carlo Buscaglione, eng. Del Core, cont.: Plans for the woodwork

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
2ANMI’s debut in the field of school-building dates back to 1889 with the construction of a school for girls in Luxor, Egypt. In the late 1800s, the Association built six schools in Upper Egypt (in El Fayum, Ghirghe, Beni Suef, Asyut, and Kena). Later, in the 1920s, it constructed a seventh, in Mansoura. The ANMI archives contain many documents regarding the restoration of the Italian schools in Asyut and Luxor, including estimates for the expansion, correspondence between the planners, blueprints, newspaper articles, and photographs of the construction site. Likewise, extensive documentary material can be found regarding the boys’ school in Mansoura, planned in 1928 by Carlo Buscaglione: the contract between the construction company and the association, specifying details about foundations, walls, and roofing, along with other components of the building such as plastering, moldings, doors, and floors. It even specifies the color scheme. The technical specifications are supplemented with blueprints, perspective drawings, elevations, sections, foundation plans, and many drawings detailing both the facade and the interiors.
Figure 3: Girls’ school, Tripoli, Libya (1924), Andrea Torasso, arch.; Gasperini & Rossi, cont.: Longitudinal sections

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
3For the construction of schools, the Association relied mainly on Italian companies with branches in Egypt (where competition with France and Britain was fierce), but also occasionally used the services of local Egyptian businesses. Only rarely was the construction company itself in charge of both the project design and the supervision of the construction, as with the new girls’ school in Luxor in 1928.4
Figure 4: Girls’ school, Smyrna (Izmir), Turkey (1903-1906), Stefano Molli, eng., Luigi Rossetti, cont.: General view

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
4ANMI started working in Smyrna, Turkey in 1896, with the construction of a new kindergarten in the Punta district. It continued with the central girls’ school, designed by Stefano Molli and built between 1903 and 1906. Cited along with the French Consul’s residence as the city’s most representative examples of modern architecture by the local newspaper Le Courrier de Smyrne, the school was destroyed by the fire that devastated the city in September 1922, but was later rebuilt. In 1924 Andrea Torasso designed the girls’ school of Tripoli, Libya, and in 1926, Carlo Buscaglione – who, at that time, had already drawn the plans for the boys’ school in Rhodes in collaboration with Florestano Di Fausto – designed the new girls’ school in the center of Benghazi. Unlike previous projects, the schools in Tripoli and Benghazi showed “Orientalist” influence.
Figure 5: Girls’ academy, Beirut (1937), Carlo Buscaglione, eng. Gasperini Rossi, cont.: Perspective signed Buscaglione

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
Figure 6: Girls’ academy, Beirut (1937), Carlo Buscaglione, eng. Gasperini Rossi, cont.: Front facade

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
5Usually, in this early period, both the design of the facade and the floor plan of the schools built by ANMI were based on designs adopted in those same years by school buildings in Italy.5 These buildings usually featured a central entrance framed with classical elements like pediments, columns, cornices, and scrolls. Inside, the classrooms opened off long corridors; the chapel was prominently located, and there were staircases on the central axis of the building or on either end.
6Buscaglione’s designs for a boys’ school and small hospital in Damascus, Syria were both neoclassical in style. The entranceways were decorated with a colossal order made up of joined pilasters resting on a high stylobate. On the other hand, for the boys’ school in Beirut, Lebanon (1931), Buscaglione designed a single C-shaped block, the central section of which presented a tripartite and, on the first floor, a sequence of triplet windows, proposing a free interpretation of the Palladian window. Between 1930 and 1937, Carlo Buscaglione collaborated with his brother Enrico on the design for both a boys’ and a girls’ school in Haifa, Palestine. Stylistically, the year 1937 was a turning point for ANMI, which gradually freed itself from conventional neo-Renaissance and neoclassical formulas in its school projects. In Beirut, Buscaglione started construction of a girls’ school inspired by the work of Marcello Piacentini, with whom he had been in contact since the years of the Benghazi girls’ school. The result was an elaborate volumetric structure. Because it had to house a variety of functions – such as kindergarten to 12th-grade classrooms, dormitories, dining facilities, and nuns’ quarters – it included three floors above the ground and a basement. The structure consisted of two wings meeting at a corner rotunda, which he redesigned several times. It expresses a desire for formal minimalism, according to Buscaglione’s personal interpretation of the themes of Fascist architecture.
7The lines of Piero Molli’s Franciscan seminary at Giza, Egypt, started in the spring of 1939 and completed in October of the same year, are also influenced by the ideas of rational architecture, although the classicist references dear to Fascist architecture are also present. It is a reinforced concrete structure, featuring a large wall of glass bricks on the northern façade, lighting the staircase.
8ANMI’s hospitals were designed and built between the 1910s and 1940s. However, their typology reflected that of the 19th century and did not undergo any significant change, except for the gradual transition in design from enclosed courtyards to pavilions,6 and then to monoblock style.7
9The oldest hospital projects sponsored by the Association were constructed in the enclosed courtyard style, such as Stefano Molli’s design for a Chinese mission hospital (1904), the neomedieval-style Hospital of St. Anthony in Smyrna designed by Molli’s son Piero in 1921, and the Hippocrates Hospital in Kos (in the Dodecanese, 1926) designed by Carlo Buscaglione and Florestano Di Fausto. The pavilion style struggled to be recognized in Italy, even if the building reform’s project report of the Ospedale Maggiore di Cremona (Ospedale Maggiore of Cremona)8 stated early as 1892 that, “structures with enclosed courtyards are obsolete, and the system which has finally prevailed is that of isolated pavilions […]. Possibly, there should be no superimposition of floors, as the unhealthy air which flows out of the windows of the floor below may infect the rooms above. […] It is advisable to connect the pavilions with roofed porticos and galleries [rather than corridors] for better air circulation.”
Figure 7: Girls’ academy, Benghazi, Libya (1926), Carlo Buscaglione and Marcello Piacentini, eng. Gasperini Rossi, cont.: Plan and details of main entrance

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
Figure 8: Girls’ academy, Benghazi, Libya (1926), Carlo Buscaglione and Marcello Piacentini, eng. Gasperini Rossi, cont.: View of the building under construction

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
10The first hospital ANMI built on the southern shores of the Mediterranean dates back to 1911. The Italian Hospital of Jerusalem, designed by the brothers Giulio and Antonio Barluzzi, opened in 1919. It was based on Siena’s 13th century Palazzo Pubblico (City Hall). The 150-bed facility specialized in the surgical treatment of women and children. It housed modern physical therapy and radiotherapy departments, chemical and microscopic research laboratories and an orthopedic workshop. Oversized and centrally located at the junction of the building’s wings, the chapel featured prominently in the composition of the structure. Giulio Barluzzi copied the “Florentine” design (on a smaller scale) the following year, for a school and a small hospital in Damascus. These facilities were redesigned by Stefano Molli in 1913, and again in 1924 by his son Piero, who combined all the building’s departments in a single longitudinal building with a central corridor.
11The majority of the Association’s hospital projects from 1924 to 1931 were designed by Carlo Buscaglione. Manager of the Association’s technical department and reference technician of the studio, he boasted extensive experience in the design of hospitals. During the 1920s, he designed the hospitals of Rhodes and Kos, collaborating with Amedeo Favero on the first project, and with Florestano Di Fausto on the second. In January 1927, he designed a hospital in Antalya, Turkey, and from 1930 to 1932, he completed work on a hospital in Tripoli, Lebanon, as well as the enlargement of the Italian hospital in Istanbul (1931). He also designed the Italian hospital in Haifa, Palestine, which opened in October 1933 and specialized in surgery. Three years later, during his stay in East Africa, he drafted the projects for two hospitals in Om Ager, Eritrea, and Gimma, Ethiopia.
Figure 9: Italian Hospital, Jerusalem (1911), Giulio and Antonio Barluzzi, arch.: Main facade

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
Figure 10: Italian Hospital, Jerusalem (1911), Giulio and Antonio Barluzzi, arch.: The hospital, nearly completed

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
12The civil hospitals of Rhodes and Antalya (never built) were of the pavilion type but, to overcome drawbacks due to excessive distances, the buildings were clustered and linked to the central block by short glazed hallways. In Tripoli, Lebanon and Haifa, Palestine, Buscaglione preferred to group the functions into a C-shaped, horizontal system consisting of a single main block and two lateral wings connected to it.9 In both cities, the hospitals were located on the outskirts, in conformity with the Italian legislation on the subject. They were structures consisting of three floors above ground and a basement, in locally-quarried stone, framed by reinforced concrete pillars, and also roofed with reinforced concrete. Although the hospital’s technical equipment, furniture, and facilities were cutting-edge for the time, its architecture still harked back to classicism. Only the facade of Haifa’s hospital, and more markedly the doctor’s residence – an isolated volume located next to the hospital – showed a desire to innovate the architectural language by incorporating some dynamism in the design of the facade’s balconies and the cylindrical staircase visible on the outer wall. Both of the companies that carried out the work on the facilities were Italian, and they imported Italian building materials and master builders specialized in tile work for the floors and wall coverings.
13In 1927 and in 1934, ANMI built two hospitals, in Amman and El Kerak, Transjordan, designed by Antonio Barluzzi and supervised by Carlo Buscaglione.
Figure 11: Italian Hospital and Girls’ school, Damascus (1931), Piero Molli, arch. Taddeo Denti, cont.: Main facade on Salahié Street

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
Figure 12: Italian Hospital and Girls’ school, Damascus (1931), Piero Molli, arch. Taddeo Denti, cont.: The main facade, completed

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
14The first one, a reinforced concrete structure completely covered with ashlar masonry, stands on a hill overlooking the city center, on a piece of land which had been bought by the Association from the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The construction permits were obtained in 1925, and the Italian company De Farro started building the following year, completing the facility by the end of June 1927. The hospital of El Kerak, a village 150 km away from Amman, is more interesting, from an architectural viewpoint. A perspective sketch drawn in pencil by Barluzzi emphasizes the general lines intended for the structure. Surrounded by hills, the twostory building is topped by a high loggia. A massive portico with joined pilasters shaped like fasces marked the entrance. The last hospital ANMI sponsored abroad was built in Tangier, Morocco. The Italian Government, banned from purchasing property due to the city’s international status, commissioned the Association to acquire a large parcel on its behalf,10 where a new hospital designed by Piero Molli was built in 1927. The three-floor building – Mediterranean in style, similar to local architecture models, covered with white plaster and topped by a terrace – was built between 1926 and 1929 by the Italian company Andrea Gasparini e Bergonzo. The load-bearing parts, as well as the water-tower tank, were built in reinforced concrete by the Porcheddu company of Turin.11
Figure 13: Italian Hospital, Tangier (1927-1928), Piero Molli, arch. Gasparini, Bergonzo & Porcheddu, cont.: West facade

Source: ANMI archives, Rome
15In Tunisia, where ANMI had not previously built any school or hospital worthy of mention, Cesare Valle designed a hospital in the city of Tunis (1935), to replace the old Italian colonial hospital, dating back to 1899.12 Its modern design and innovative forms put it far ahead of any of the styles we have reviewed thus far. It is a monoblock-style building; that is, according to the term coined by rationalist architects, an essentially vertical, multi-story hospital. Its compact organization made it much more efficient for both builders and users.
16ANMI’s work in the field of school and hospital architecture in the countries on the southern rim of the Mediterranean is a valuable reference for the historical evaluation of this type of facility. It also attests to the success which greeted the export of both Italian architectural models and the skills of Italian contractors.
Notes de bas de page
1 The organization’s headquarters are located at 256 Via Cavour in Rome.
2 Regarding all of ANMI’s works, see Ezio Godoli, Anna Nuzzaci, L’Associazione Nazionale per soccorrere i Missionari Italiani e i suoi Ingegneri, Florence: Maschietto Editore, 2009.
3 The Italian State deemed it convenient to put the Association in charge of the education and health care of Italian communities abroad. As a result, ANMI primarily focused on building schools and hospitals for the Italians.
4 The Ernesto De Farro company, on behalf of ANMI, carried out the planning, execution, and construction supervision of the Luxor girls’ school in 1928.
5 Italy enacted new standards for school architecture by ministerial decree dated May 4, 1925.
6 In use throughout France from the end of the 18th century, the pavilion style of hospital construction was exported and spread throughout Europe along with the revolutionary ideas. It was a standard for hospital construction until the 1950s. In Italy proper, one of the earliest examples is the Umberto I hospital in Monza, with single-story pavilions arranged around a covered central courtyard, and separated by a broad central street, dividing men’s from women’s wards.
7 On hospital construction, see Hermann Distel, “La moderna edilizia ospedaliera,” Edilizia Moderna, 7/21-22, 1936, p. 8-19 and Giulio Roisecco, “Tecnica dell’organismo ospitaliero,” Architettura, 19/5, 1940, p. 229-240.
8 Ettore Signori, Relazione e Progetti presentati dall’ing. Ettore Signori al Consiglio degli Istituti Ospedalieri , Cremona: Tipografia Sociale, 1890.
9 For the hospitals of Rhodes, Tripoli (Lebanon), and Haifa see “I nuovi ospedali chirurgici di Rodi, Tripoli del Libano e Haifa in Palestina,” L’Ospedale Maggiore: Rivista scientifico-pratica dell’Ospedale Maggiore di Milano ed Istituti sanitari annessi, n° 2, 1934, p. 111-121.
10 The estate of the former Sultan Moulay Abd al-Hafid, it was a property consisting of a vast garden, a large central palace with two smaller adjoining buildings, and other small detached structures.
11 See Vilma Fasoli’s article, “The Porcheddu company and the projects for reinforced concrete water tanks”.
12 See Milva Giacomelli, “L’Hôpital colonial italien Giuseppe Garibaldi à Tunis de Cesare Valle” in Ezio Godoli, Silvia Finzi, Milva Giacomelli, Ahmed Saadaoui (eds.), Architectures et architectes italiens au Maghreb. Actes du colloque international tenu aux Archives nationales de Tunisie, Tunis, 10-12 décembre 2009, Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2011, p. 84-99.
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