Uffizi expansion goes ahead despite opposition

Sunday, 26 August 2007 23:00

Florence, Italy - The plan to add a huge new modernist portico to Florence's Uffizi Gallery, the most controversial building project of recent times in Italy, is to go ahead. After nine years of bitter argument and despite the rage of Florentines including the opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli, the dramatic and imposing new portico at the side of Italy's most famous art museum was given approval this week by the city's super-intendent of architectonic goods, Paola Grifoni.

Its designer is Arata Isozaki, the celebrated avant garde architect from Kyushu in Japan whose other works in Italy include the ice hockey stadium for Turin's 2006 Winter Olympics. In 1998 he won the competition to design the museum's new exit against top foreign practices, including Britain's Norman Foster and Hans Hollein of Austria.

His solution was simple, bold and arresting: a huge cantilevered canopy fanning out from the gallery, supported by slim rectangular pilasters. There was no attempt to integrate the new work with the Renaissance original: the contrast between old and modern was deliberately stark.

Supporters of the work hailed the Isozaki design as a masterpiece. "After decades of frustration and silence," wrote the architect Nicola Santini, "architecture has come back to talk to Florence again, with clear language and strong ideas." The last large modern building to be erected in Florence is the station, which dates from 1935.

But the reaction of conservatives was ferocious. Oriana Fallaci, the Florentine journalist and novelist, called the design "absolutely indecent and unheard of", and threatened to return to Florence from her home in New York "and tear it to pieces with my bare hands".

The fogeyish art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, appointed under-secretary in the Ministry of Culture under Silvio Berlusconi in 2001, launched a campaign to get "this horror" scrapped. He claimed that the new portico's foundations would threaten possible undiscovered archaeological treasures. "The other fundamental thing," he wrote, "is that there is an urbanistic law that defines Piazza Castellani and its surroundings as "Zone A", in other words as unalterable ... The cost [£4.7m] is absurd for a work without functional importance, and this architecture would change the face of Zone A which the law considers unalterable. Therefore it is an unacceptable violation."

"It's taken almost 10 years to get this far," Mr Isozaki said yesterday from his office in Tokyo. "We submitted the original drawings in 1997. With Sgarbi it was like fighting in the boxing ring, and even after he went there were many right-wing, chauvinistic cultural people who were opposed to it. But things changed after the appointment of Rutelli, who agreed to go ahead with it. That was at the end of last year, and many newspapers said we would start in the spring." The architect now expects building work to start in the autumn, and for the structure to be completion by 2011.

Cream of the Uffizi Gallery collection : Bacchus, by Caravaggio - Primavera, by Botticelli - The Birth of Venus, by Botticelli - The Duke and Duchess of Urbino, by Piero della Francesca - The Annunciation, by Leonardo da Vinci