Rome, Manhattan_ From religious economies to road networks

{ Rome, Manhattan } From religious economies to road networks

Rome, Manhattan From religious economies to road networks

~

Dissertation Presentation Date: February 2016

Bousios Georgios Lampropoulou Aglaia

Supervising Professor

P. Tournikiotis

School of Architecture National Technical University of Athens

~ The current issue is a revised and epitomized English edition of an originally longer work, written and presented in Greek

Α

{ 01. cause | sacred and profane_ a non-dualism } ‘Thank God I’m an atheist!’ ~ L.Bunuel

In 1969, while the revolutionary ideals of May ’68 still lingered over the city of Paris, Spanish auteur and Parisian resident Luis Bunuel made a film about one of the most cherished pilgrimages of Catholicism, the one to the remains of Apostle Saint James in Santiago de Compostella. In La Voie Lactee (The Milky Way, 1969) by narrating the ambiguous itinerary of two contemporary Frenchmen to the historic cathedral, Bunuel delivered his take on the fundamental, since the dawn of time and philosophy, dualism between the sacred and the profane, a scheme re-emerging over and over again throughout the film only to be repeatedly overturned. The roads crossed by the two pilgrims and the small inns, medieval cities and dubious figures scattered along the way, all point out the blurred lines of this (non) dualism and question absolute truths, religious fanaticism as well as political ideology.

1 Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986), historian of religion, philosopher and fiction writer, in his work ‘Das Heilige und das Profane (1957), tries to present the sacred in its wholeness.

Influenced by the work of Rudolf Otto ‘Das Heilige’ (1917), he defines the sacred as the opposite of the profane.

2 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, p. 15

3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses, ed. Susan Dunn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 245

4 Thomas Hobbes, ‘Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil’ (1651)

While Bunuel as an artist refuses to be absolute, modern historian of religions Mircea Eliade defines the Sacred and the Profane 1 as two distinct modes of being, contradicting the homo religiosus of traditional societies 2 to the desacralised ethics of the modern man. After all, ‘at first men had no kings save the gods, and no government save theocracy’ 3 according to Rousseau. The concepts of the sacred and the profane were inextricably linked in Christian western culture before the 17th century, when theology and politics interweaved resulting in theocratic states. The shift from theocracy to secular states and from theology to law occurs as Machiavelli, Bodin and Hobbes propose a radical secularization of politics with a powerful Prince, a Sovereign state or an artificial Machine, an apparatus of government. Ironically, the last one, a clearly rational construct

by Hobbes for the organization of the state, bears the name of a biblical monster; Leviathan 4 transforms from a Christian allegory to the predominant symbol of the birth of modern political science. Despite the fact that the rise of modernity has been associated ever since with an increasing divergence between church and state, as the political has rather approached the sphere of economy, theorists of the 20th century, from Weber to Foucault, still opted for a frame of underestimated references and spiritual connotations in modern societies.

Thus, one can conclude that there is a continuous shift in balance between religion, politics and economy as equally determining social forces. The architect’s or urbanist’s role in this becomes apparent when the tangible proof of the formers’ multiple interactions can be identified on the urban fabric. In every society, the city emerges as the main field of action, a ground for expression and theater of change.

Place and time implicate the sacred and the profane in an incessant role play, in which this archetypical non-dualism produces space and motion.

A Theocracy, the Secular State and the Religious Market, will be examined as the points of convergence between religion, politics and economy

In fact, the two pilgrims of Bunuel’s fiction follow the traditional route to the holy destination consistently, but the narrative structure of their journey is anything but consistent. The one linear pilgrimage starts to fragment into multiple, smaller storylines, ranging from non-time to historic time and from the Christian repertoire to the wild world of Bunuel’s obsessions. However, the continuous flow of people and goods leave their mark on the various stops of the journey. Sacred places along with their spatial connections are viewed as components of the urban syntax and, thus, the pilgrimage becomes an urban event. It has been, after all, the foremost hybrid of religious intention, political symbolism and economic act. { Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

5

Therefore, this non-linear but coherent sequence is regarded as the most appropriate structural tool for a narrative between different places and time periods, where the procession to a Christian basilica seems paradoxically similar to the transatlantic journey of a European architect and a pope stands side by side with three American technocrats. Two case studies, Counter-reformation Rome and the modern epitome of Manhattan are juxtaposed, with the intention to highlight sacred economies and road networks as urban stimulators of the past and possible foreshadowers of future urbanism, such as in the case of contemporary Lagos’ City of God.

{ 02. Rome | the historic city } ‘A thousand roads lead men forever to Rome’ ~ Alain de Lille, ‘Liber Parabolarum’, 1175 Indeed, a series of consistent routes gradually converge through Central Europe and head towards Rome. For many centuries, they served as a meeting point for the three great pilgrimages of the Middle Ages: Santiago de Compostela to the west, the southern ports where the ships heading for the Holy Lands were put to sea and, finally, the sacred city of Rome. Inside the city - ‘Intra Muros’ - a series of individual, planned routes, each with a wall gate as its starting point, run among ancient and Christian monuments. Rome, in the eyes of the arriving pilgrims, is the city where the tombs of their Saints lie alongside the great basilicas. At the same time though, in their collective consciousness, it is also the city of the Aurelian Walls, the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the city of ancient aqueducts and scattered ruins.

{ 02.a The three faces of Rome’s urban identity } One can discern three main civic catalysts in medieval and renaissance Rome: the feudal elite of noble families, the city’s commune, and, of course, the papal authority. The transition from the Middle Ages to Counter – Reformation is marked by a continuous decline of the peoples’ collectivity, accompanied by the growing power of the Pope over all roman noble houses.

Nonetheless, Medieval Rome was just a fragment of its former self, confined to the area southeast of Castello S. Angelo, near Tiber’s bank, reaching up to the Capitoline Hill. The once ancient capital of one million souls had a population of roughly 17.000 during the 13th century 5. As soon as the Popes return from their brief but symbolically significant exile in Avignon, a new social equilibrium starts to reflect upon the spatial organization of Renaissance Rome. In the ‘Borgo’ area, the newly established Vatican seat along with Saint Peter’s Basilica serve as the spiritual centre of the city, while across the system of parallel streets lies the real establishment of power: the Papal Treasury inside Castello Sant’ Angelo. The fact that the Pope himself can coin money and thus determine currency rates and the future of trade further highlights his dominant role as a financial regulator among the royal houses.

Besides, many of the Popes themselves belonged to these great noble houses and their Palazzos’ location in the urban fabric was the one to determine the design of any new public space. For instance, Pope Paul III – a member of the famous Farnese house – enhanced Palazzo Farnese with the construction of the city’s first great Renaissance Square. These prismatic, large-scale structures operated as dynamic financial units, providing accommodation and income for lower social classes, though still remaining strictly confined to the disorienting context of the unstructured medieval fabric. This form of ‘urban feudalism’ was, in fact, the only dynamic unit of urban life in Rome for many years and the Popes as planners did their best to support and perpetuate it.

Things would start to change during the first years of the 16th century, when the 6

{ Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

5 Siegfried Giedion, ‘Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition’, p. 77

D

B

Pilgrims visiting the Seven Churches of Rome during the Holy Year of 1575, Antoine Lafrery, engraving, 1575

D A view of ‘New Rome’, Jodocus Hondius, engraving, 1627. ~ The density of the medieval city’s center is easily discernible, as well as the limits of the Aurelian Walls, while on the opposite side of River Tiber lies the Castello Sant’ Angelo and the parallel streets of Borgo Nuovo.

success of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, put pressure on the Catholic Church.

The efforts of a significant Counter – Reformation, starting at that point, would soon manifest the complex urban identity of Rome’s theocracy.

{ 02.b Pope Sixtus V’s plan } A Late – Renaissance Pope envisions and lays the foundations of Baroque Rome B

C

6 Fontana, apart from the works he carried out under Sixtus’s reign, he also designed the Lateran Palace. The process of transporting and placing the massive Egyptian obeliscs was, at that time, considered a unique feat and it is thoroughly described from the architect himself, in ‘Della transportatione dell’ obelisco Vaticano’, 1590

7 Edmund Bacon, ‘Design of Cities’, p. 138

8 Richard Sennett, ‘The Conscience of the Eye: Design and Social Life of Cities’, p. 153

C Map of Rome, Giovanni Francesco Bordino, engraving, 1588 E Part of Nolli’s Map – Piazza Navona, the Pantheon and the Campidoglio are visible

Antoine Lafrery’s engraving of 1575, depicts crowds of pilgrims swarming between the 7 great Christian Churches of Rome: S. Peter’s Cathedral, Santa Maria Maggiore, S. Giovanni Laterano and S. Croce in Jerusalem surrounded by ruins of the Roman Walls as well as the churches of San Paolo, S. Sebastiano and S. Lorenzo, scattered in the countryside outside the borders of the ancient capital. Undeniably, this is neither a typical nor realistic view of the city of Rome. The engraving could never be described as a map, a thorough depiction of the city’s topography or its spatial organization. On the contrary, it constitutes a pretty accurate visualization of a single idea: The city of Rome as a destination of pilgrimage . This single idea would become the driving force behind the plan for a new city of Rome envisaged by Felix Perreti, also known as Cardinal Montalto, while he waited for the moment he would sit on the Papal Throne.

That moment would arrive nearly 13 years later, in 1585, only five years before his death, too soon for him to completely realize his great vision. The key moment when Pope Sixtus V’s plan is conceived constitutes a point of transition for the city, as a lateRenaissance Pope envisions a Baroque capital.

On a different engraving, the one by Giovanni Francesco Bordino in 1588, lies the closest there is to a depiction of Sixtus’ plan, since the original has not been preserved. This engraving bears a clear resemblance to the one made by Lafrery a few years earlier.

However, the same seven churches – destinations are now depicted completely devoid of any architectural representation, transformed into abstract symbols connected with simple, intersecting lines. They have become part of a greater network, equal points of interest, along with ancient monuments, such as the Coliseum, Trajan’s Column or the roman statues of Dioscuri. And the pilgrims’ irregular movements have now turned into clear, straight lines.

Sixtus appoints Domenico Fontana 6, his friend and architect of his own Villa Montalto – an isolated villa in the outskirts of the ancient city, surrounded by vineyards – as the designer of Rome’s regeneration plan. It is in fact a pretty simple plan, putting in use pre-existing streets and proposing the construction of one more – Strada Felice (from Sixtus’ name), which would connect Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore with Piazza del Popolo. As urban planner and theorist Edmund Bacon has aptly noted, the movement system 7 is in fact the strongest and most dominant of the plan’s design elements. And this system is based on the definition and connection of unique focal points, marked by the placement of Egyptian obelisks.

The use of the obelisk as an organizing tool for the planning of new Rome is intimidating, mainly because it bears a major contradiction within its core. A pagan symbol is used as a means to signify a series of Christian pilgrimage routes. Why would the new Pope choose such an object as the design brand for the city’s developing street network? Was the reason truly symbolic, or even practical? The truth lies somewhere in between. The obelisk becomes a spatial tool for the implementation of the principles of renaissance perspective upon the urban fabric. The lack of tension in the churches’ flat facades, is hereby filled in by a single landmark in three – dimensional space. The obelisks are clearly not the destination of the routes, but rather the key element which guides the pilgrims’ gaze and intensifies the street’s linear perspective, transforming it into a ‘tunnel of vision’ 8. { Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

7

B

D

C

E

{ 02.c A Pope’s intention and a city’s urban birth } Although the Pope’s intention surely lies in strengthening the church’s stance during demanding times of dispute and division, the new plan’s scope spans far beyond its religious cause. Between the medieval city and the ancient walls, lies the ‘disabitato’ 9, a deserted area filled with ancient ruins and scattered temples, connected by only a few, scarce roads. Sixtus’ plan, which deliberately stays away from the medieval centre and the Renaissance Borgo, reflects the first significant attempt of the city to reclaim its old territory. Junctions of intersecting highways are marked by four obelisks, the only new street – Strada Felice – almost vertically intersects Strada Pia, while Palazzo Quirinalle has now been fully constructed. These are the only civil works completed during the reign of Pope Sixtus V. As Edmund Bacon observes: ‘the actual physical accomplishment at the time of Sixtus’s death was quite pathetic’ 10. His work can only be truly evaluated when combined with subsequent works, which gradually made the ancient, Intra Muros area, a part of Baroque Rome.

In other words, the plan was conceived in anticipation of a residential growth for Rome. The pre-existing image of the city comprised summer residences of noble families scattered between farmlands, a rural scenery in complete contrast to the newly constructed, grandiose urban highways. These highways actually became the only organizational element in a landscape of disarray, awaiting for a city to serve.

Another crucial point not to neglect is that the first thing Sixtus V did when he became Pope, was to address the water supply issue, which was the main reason why the medieval city had been confined for so many years to the area around river Tiber. By reconstructing the ancient aqueduct of Alexandrina, which was renamed Acqua Felice, he simultaneously benefited his personal villa and provided important social work.

As Spiro Kostof points out in ‘A History of Architecture’: ‘the prerequisites [to generate new residential quarters] were two: roads and water. Sixtus sought to provide both’ 11.

And by providing these, a new financial reality emerged. Rome might lack the inherent benefits of the cities of the Italian North, but this didn’t stop the Pope from boosting the wool and silk small industry and, by extension, all trade operations in the city.

The developing network of highways gave easy access to new land, infrastructure and facilities. It also mobilized the real estate market, as well as construction activity throughout the city. However, these financial implications behind Sixtus’ decisions should be examined alongside their underlying political motives. Supporting economic growth in the disabitato area, for example, was a clever way to bypass the feudal control that many important families still exercised in the city’s centre. At the same time, the Palazzos, for the first time in many years, began to gradually lose some of their previously undeniable influence. In their shoes, Villa Montalto stood right in the middle of the new highway system, surrounded by vast, unexploited masses of land.

All of the above point out that the desirable political system consisted of a potent, central Papal authority which would gradually collect most of the city’s wealth, while simultaneously enjoying the full support of an ascending ‘bourgeoisie’, not necessarily of noble descent, in a context of absolute compliance and control.

The great new highways, wide enough to allow the movement of five parallel carriages, at a time when the carriage was not widely used, must have impressed the citizens of Rome as much as the haussmannian boulevards took Paris by surprise, some centuries later, when cars made their first appearance. Besides, Rome’s new highway system finally offered a solution to the massive ‘traffic jam’ of pilgrims crowding, since the Middle Ages, the areas around Ponte Sant’ Angelo and the ancient wall gates. These last observations epitomize the twofold character of the whole project, from practicality and urban insight to the enhancement of a centuries’ old, spiritual tradition.

Christianity thus became the structural element of an early ‘modern’ urban plan.

10

{ Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

9 In Italian, ‘disabitato’ means ‘the uninhabited’ and was used as a word to describe the deserted periphery of Rome, which was enclosed with the Aurelian Walls in the 16th century.

10 Edmund Bacon, Design of Cities, p. 131

11 Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, p. 498

{ 02.d A holy city after all } But what is the urban status of Rome nearly one and a half century after Sixtus’ plan?

12 Giambattista Nolli (1701 – 56), an Italian architect, designed the extremely detailed ‘Pianta Grande di Roma’, later known as ‘Nolli Map’, between 1736 - 48. The work was assigned to him by Pope Benedict XIV. ~ Once more, the Head of the Catholic Church, finances and oversees the whole project.

E

Gianbattista Nolli’s map 12 of 1748 is certainly the clearest manifestation of the structural role of Catholicism in Rome’s urban fabric. It is a detailed mapping, commissioned to Nolli by Pope Benedict XIV, in which the once standalone churches of pilgrimage are now an integral part of a dense urban fabric. The vision of Sixtus and of those who carried it on is now forever imprinted on Rome’s plan. Churches are depicted in white, united with the streets, as their interior becomes an extension of public movement.

This new image of Rome reminds us of Lafrery’s engraving with the great temples rising as the sole signs of human presence in an otherwise desolate land. The sacred city of Rome may have changed, but its importance in the minds of pilgrims remains the same. In Nolli’s Map, the sacred space isn’t strictly confined to the fixed interior of each church. It expands to the exterior, to the public space, which transforms in turn to a kind of spiritual nave. Conversely, public squares and streets serve as the field where pilgrims’ and citizens’ courses converge and are then channelled into open, accessible temples. The act of pilgrimage and the experience of the city have now become inextricably bound. Participation in the latter inevitably entails an involvement in the former as well.

{ 03. Manhattan | the grid } ‘What is Manhattan? An island bordered by water and space, with an invigorating climate, an area approximately twelve miles long and two miles wide. Surface area about sixteen thousand acres.’

Le Corbusier, ‘Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches’, 1937

13 Le Corbusier, When The Cathedrals Were White, p. 90

Le Corbusier originally visited New York in 1935. His first glimpse of the island of Manhattan on a misty Monday morning triggered contradictory thoughts, brimming with childish excitement: ‘A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe’ 13. In the middle of a personal quest, submerged in a spirituality that transcends this journey into a kind of ‘private’ pilgrimage, the European architect sees in this island a perfect candidate for his Ville Radieuse.

Manhattan is a brand new city, the densest and heaviest urban fabric of its time, but at the same time a place freed from the burden of European tradition, ready to fulfill fantasies and impossible scenarios. It may no longer be green or empty, but in the architect’s eyes it still gives the promise of a plot of land.

{ 03.a A clean slate, a New Europe } It is the same promise of a tabula rasa that lays in the origin of the American dream, when the first colonists, known as the Pilgrims, crossed the sea from Plymouth, England to the New World in 1620. Members of the English Separatist Church, Puritans in other words, who wished their separation from the Anglican Church, established their own Plymouth, a new, pure version of the fatherland they were deprived of.

The naming process reveals the profoundly religious nature of their journey to the New World. A pilgrimage without destination or rather, one determined to create its own. Protestantism constituted the basis for the creation of a new reality in America, in contrast to the old one, in conflict with mother Europe and everything it entailed. And this new reality was fundamentally based on the constant buying and selling of land. { Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

11

In the case of New York, the ‘mythical’ sale of Manhattan from the Indians to Peter Minuit shows better than none that the island of hills (Mannahatta) was nothing more than a good plot of land to the Dutch, the same one Le Corbusier spotted in 1935, praising the lot’s natural advantages. However, New Amsterdam was originally planned true to the old one with the intent of becoming bigger, denser, greater. As Rem Koolhaas observes in an engraving from 1672, a fictional representation of what the new-born city attempted to be, ‘a church, a stock market, a city hall, a palace of justice, a prison and, outside the walls, a hospital, complete the apparatus of the mother civilization’ 14. The European desire to search for physical sanctuary in the hands of authority has yet to be replaced by the protestant desire for power, as sociologist Richard Sennett explains 15.

In 1664 New Netherland surrendered to New England and New Amsterdam became Manhattan, returning to its original Indian name. American Puritans got out of the walls and dared to abandon the exact copies of the cities they had been trying to elope.

The lure of the wilderness 16, the empty, unexploited space of the rural land they worked on, resurfaced. With the city’s population over-tripling to nearly 100.000 and after a decade of epidemics, in 1807 the City Council commanded a plan for the expansion of Manhattan to the north, above Huston Street: an urban plan for a non-existent urban center, or actually one which would create its own.

14 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, p. 15

15 Richard Sennett, ‘The Conscience of The Eye: Design and Social Life of Cities’, p. 42-45

16 ibid., p. 43

{ 03.b The Manhattan grid } ~ A neutral tool forms the ethics of a modern metropolis

In 1811, the famous Commissioners’ Plan establishes the Manhattan Grid, a grid plan composed of: 120 avenues from North to South 150 streets from East to West 2028 blocks in a purely agricultural land with streams and hills, estates and farms

The three men who undertook the four-year survey and design of the new plan, known as the Commissioners, were, as the name suggests, members of a technocratic committee: the president, Gouverneur Morris, a scholar and statesman among the authors of the Constitution, the lawyer John Rutherford and Simeon de Witt, geographer and Surveyor General of the State of New York. The argument for the choice of a gridiron plan, as presented in the celebrated Commissioners’ Remarks, was not some kind of revolutionary philosophy, but the obvious point of utility. ‘Straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in’ and the basic principle behind the plan is, as they explained, ‘facilitating buying and selling and improving real-estate’ 17. A city designed to be sold, to be bought, to be built. In fact, common interest lies in the pursuit of individual economic success.

Nevertheless, which is the resulting urban form?

As Lewis Mumford states, ‘The resurgent capitalism of the seventeenth century treated the individual lot and the block, the street and the avenue, as abstract units for buying and selling, without respect for historic uses, for topographic conditions or for social needs’ 18. New York thus becomes the urban manifest of capitalism and an anti-symbol. Even if it opposes the familiar and long-established spirituality of European capitals, on second thought it develops its very own, which would so deeply move Le Corbusier a century later. The abstract units that Mumford speaks of, more than a merely capitalistic demand, may have provided answers to a brand-new society that was anxiously looking for a spatial vocabulary to express its desires and beliefs.

12

{ Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

17 William Bridges, Commissioners’ Remarks, Map of the City of New York and Island of Manhattan (New York, 1811), p.24 ~ These are the official remarks and clarifications published along with the original plan of 1811.

18 Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), p. 421

F Madison Avenue & 55th Street, during construction, photograph, 1875. ~ The straight lines, here, have already wiped the natural terrain, while construction works are still carried out in order to rise the new facades on street level

G detail from August Will’s aquarelle ~ a comparison between Manhattan’s skylines, one from 1873, the other from 1898. On the right side of the aquarelle, highlighted in yellow color, Trinity Church is visible in both skylines.

On a quite different note, the author of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ and philosopher Thomas Jefferson proposed a gridiron plan for Washington, the new American capital.

Although conservative circles dismissed it as sterile and tiresome, he envisaged a palpable proof of American modernity. Despite their accusations of lack of meaning in the design, he saw a liberating change of course away from European conservatism.

The grid was exalted from a mere tool of agricultural planning to the very foundation of a capital’s creation. The absence of references became the reference itself.

19 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of The Eye: Design and Social Life of Cities, p. 48

Besides, Max Weber in his most celebrated work ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ argues that capitalist economics are inextricably linked to the rise of reformation movements throughout Europe, which came to address the contradictory needs of the Christian morale at the verge of modernity. American Puritans, no more at odds with economic welfare but in ideological conflict with Europe, search for the spatial expression of their mode of life. The grid only exists to offer every society the tool it needs. As Sennett suggests, for the American society of the modern era, ‘the grid stands as the means to the neutralization of the environment’ 19.

The neutrality of space, therefore, derives from the neutrality of the Protestant ethic.

20 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, p. 22

F

21 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of The Eye: Design and Social Life of Cities, p. 46

22 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, p. 21

This point lies, first and foremost, on the promise of infinite expansion. The grid is boundless. No limit, no beginning and no ending, nothing but a neutral sequence of identical blocks. Apparently, when there is neither a beginning nor an end, there is no center, which is a much more significant observation, in terms of semiotics.

The notion of a center, a fixed point, forms the basis of sacred space. On the contrary, for nonreligious man ‘space is homogeneous and neutral… Geometrical space can be cut and delimited in any direction’ 20 according to Eliade. This description fits perfectly the spatial feeling of the Manhattan grid, which also introduced the absolute rationalization of landscape. It was laid down with total disregard for the pre-existing farmlands and it was implemented with the same rigor, flattening hills and demolishing all kinds of structures. The city became an empty ‘vessel’, ready to host all possible functional scenarios. And in this context, the European city that materializes ‘hierarchies of authority’ gives its place to the one that establishes ‘competition for power’. ‘Neutrality becomes an instrument of power’ 21 and architecture is responsible for re-inventing the new values. As Koolhaas declares: ‘The icons of religion are replaced by those of building.

Architecture is Manhattan’s new religion.’ 22

{ 03.c The third dimension and the new cathedrals } 23 Le Corbusier, ‘When The Cathedrals Were White’, p. 56

24 Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches.

Voyage au pays des timides (Paris: éditions Plon,1937) η πρώτη έκδοση

H Woolworth Building I Broadway Temple

The implementation of the new plan for the island of Manhattan began just after its conception, but took more than a century for the vision of 1811 to be fully manifested.

And that is because, even though the grid is a two-dimensional design, a street plan that does not define the city’s skyline, it suggests its form exactly through the absence of planning. During the first decades of the 20th century, it was the third dimension that gave birth suddenly and with tremendous momentum to the vision of Manhattan, as it was established in our collective consciousness: a vertical city.

In 1935, when Le Corbusier sets eyes on Manhattan, it is already a city of skyscrapers, the perfect materialization of the spirit of competition. As the architect intuitively observes, ‘football, boxing, the risky diversions of cowboys-there is a quality of spirit in all that’23. And its expression in the urban phenomenon was prepared with the layout of the grid and fulfilled with the help of the skyscraper. ‘When the cathedrals were white’24 contemplates Le Corbusier and his analogy is something more than poetic license.

Skyscrapers represent an equally historic feat of engineering as the cathedrals of medieval times, and, mainly, they arouse the same feelings to the ‘believers’ of the new era: awe, thrill, hope, everything the architect feels at the island’s sight. Although { Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

13

F

G

H

I

the emotional impact is reasonable, what one seems to be missing is the obvious visual analogy: the first skyscrapers do look like cathedrals! Le Corbusier’s drawings highlight the elaborate ornaments and the grandiose crowns of the prisms, filling the neutral grid of the plan with expressive, historically charged forms.

To further strengthen this connection, the Woolworth Building 25 was christened ‘the Cathedral of Commerce’, as commerce itself was celebrated as a kind of secular religion.

A building that hosted strictly entrepreneurial activities on the inside, wore a robe of ‘pure spirituality’ 26 on the outside. Architecture, with an explicit mood of eclecticism, searched for the patterns which would establish private enterprise in the collective consciousness as something more than a source of income. And while public monuments had turned mainly to classicism and horizontality for their urban ‘fight back’, religion came to reclaim the sky. Nonetheless, it did not come as the one and only, centralized religious authority of European metropolises, but as a private enterprise, one among many others. In this respect, the Broadway Temple 27 was a Methodist skyscraper church, a hybrid of a neo-gothic temple and a modern office tower, that was never completed, ‘a magnificent advertisement for God’s business’ with a 23-meters-high rotating neon cross (!). Skyscrapers had surpassed churches while churches tried to become skyscrapers, in a paradox that reveals a lot about the ultimately changed character of religion in the American society of the 20th century.

25 The Woolworth Building, by the architect Cass Gilbert, 1911 - 13.

The skyscraper belonging to business entrepreneur Frank Woolworth, with a capacity to host 14000 workers and residents across its 60 floors, actually resembles a cathedral for a new age.

26 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, p. 99

H I 27 The Broadway Temple, by architect Don Barber, was never realized. The huge construction cost of 4 million dollars, as well as the economic crisis of 1929, were responsible for the halting of the building’s construction process, which had only started in 1925. In 1947, it was continued in a much smaller scale, and today 3 floors exist instead of the plan’s original 40, operating as the Broadway Temple of the United Methodist Church, a reminiscent of the older, unfinished vision.

{ 04. a comparative analysis | 2 cases of urban reform } ~ Where does the divergence between the American model and the European paradigm really lie? How far Project Manhattan stands indeed from another plan of radical urban reform, like Sixtus V’s baroque Rome?

‘Everything seems to be new’ 28. A statement which could have belonged to Le Corbusier actually comes from a priest who returned to Rome just after Pope Sixtus V death.

It could also describe, however, the intensity and fierceness of Manhattan’s urban development, almost unparalleled in global history of cities. Within this special context, where a radical urban plan’s conception and realisation precedes the actual needs it is destined to serve and a unique decisive moment dictates all future urban development, a critical comparative process between Project Manhattan and Rome of Pope Sixtus V can lead to a significant insight into the way the two cities have evolved over time.

28 Sigfried Giedion, Time, Space and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, p. 95

{ 04.a Pope Sixtus and the Three Commissioners } The 3 Commissioners were representatives of the political authority. They did not benefit from papal infallibility, let alone the dominant position of a spiritual leader.

Nevertheless, Morris, for whom science and religion were both in his list of ‘guardians of social happiness’ 29, argues that ‘There must be something more to hope than pleasure, wealth and power…There must be religion’ 30. In his eyes, labor and prosperity, which the grid so well serves, constitute a Christian command. The obvious argument of utility, therefore, is overturned, or rather enhanced by a far from negligible spiritual ground.

On the other hand, the head of the Catholic Church is driven by a secular determination in conceptualising and constructing a functional urban regeneration plan.

Civil servants speak like priests, whereas a priest acts like a civil servant. The creators of the Manhattan Grid, the very symbol of modernity, abide by firm religious convictions, while the mastermind behind Counter-Reformation Rome is a pope of humble origins and deep interest in construction work. In an engraving of 1589, Pope Sixtus V appears restless, surrounded not by holy relics but obelisks and fountains. Morris on the other hand, in a similar engraving of 1787, appears calm, with the look of a true spiritual man.

16

{ Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

29

Reuben Skye Rose-Redwood, ‘Rationalizing the Landscape: Superimposing the Grid upon the Island of Manhattan’, p. 81 (citation from Morris, ‘An Inaugural Discourse’)

30

Ibid., p. 80 (Morris, An Inaugural Discourse, p. 31-2)

J Pope Sixtus V, engraving by Giovanni Pinadello, 1589.

K Gouverneur Morris I, engraving by J. Rogers, 1787.

J

K

L

M

{ 04.b The Aurelian Walls and Manhattan’s Limitless Expansion } Manhattan is an island. Water and space surround it, clearer boundaries than any manmade walls. However, it is not conceived as a finite area. Setting aside the practical explanation of possible extensions to the nearby shores through bridges, the theoretical model of infinite expansion is what matters the most. The city expands, ignoring even natural borders, while historical or symbolic restraints are completely absent. The genius loci is obliterated.

On the opposite side, Rome has its ancient walls, witnesses of the Empire. The revival of Rome as the eternal city lies on the recovery, both literal and metaphorical, of its previous grandeur. Ironically, the Aurelian walls, instead of blocking its expansion, become the moving force of its urban renaissance. If the creation of Baroque Rome is potentially a circular narrative, which tends to find its way back to the beginning of the story, the creation of Manhattan can be paralleled to a linear narrative: an urban story unravels and no wall defines its end.

{ 04.c Points of Convergence } Every intersection on the Manhattan Grid is an utterly defined point on the gridiron, a dense node, neither different from the previous one, nor greater than the next one. The bolts placed by surveyor J. Randel indicated each and every one of the approximately 1000 future junctions. The even intervals however, exclude from the very start, any attempt to differentiate or punctuate a specific node. In other words, all of them cooperate as punctuation marks of a single sentence.

31 Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, p. 500

In Rome’s obelisks’ case though, we have a groundbreaking choice of unique points in three-dimensional space. As Kostof remarks, the obelisk bears the ‘message of universal power’ 31. Their archetypical form is Egyptian, while during the years of the Roman Empire they served to attest to the Emperor’s absolute authority. While the grid’s intersections are nodes of a network, the obelisks create charged centers. The cross on their top does not constitute the point where two straight lines meet in space, but the vantage point of a religion in historical time. More than a focal point, it becomes a symbol and instead of signalizing, it gives meaning to the urban experience.

{ 04.d The Topography }

32 ibid. , p. 498

L An obelisk in Rome? - Nope ~ The obelisk of Pharaoh Thutmosis III, or ‘Cleopatra’s needle’, as it is more commonly known, is situated within Central Park, just behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art

M The marble bolt No 26, which John Randel Jr. placed on the future junction of 4th Avenue & 24th Street

The ‘island of hills’, Manhattan’s etymology, is now nothing more than a nostalgic reference to its long gone topography, as revealed by the 1874 topographical map’s caption. The way in which an utterly rationalistic plan of straight lines is superimposed on a non-flat terrain is different from time to time. But the grid completely flattens every peak, changes every coastline, and attacks both natural and man-made background with the same assimilative force.

On the other hand, in Rome of seven hills, the new streets neither erase the hilly terrain, nor settle. They keep their nonnegotiable straight paths, cutting through hills only if necessary. As Domenico Fontana enthusiastically writes, ‘beyond the religious purposes, these beauties (the new streets) provide a pasture for the bodily senses’ 32. Thus, Strada Felice oscillates in space, creating a unique rhythmic experience. Catholic Rome worships its hills as much as it cherishes its pagan temples, whereas modernist Manhattan renounces its topography as willingly as it distances itself from its European roots.

{ Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

19

{ 04.e Power and Authority } If we acknowledge that in Manhattan competition for economic power is materialized in the race of skyscrapers, the expression of authority in the American city relies on subjective perception rather than an absolute truth. On the other side, the papal office is clearly viewed as an authority in the spiritual and political life of Europe.

However, his rivalry with secular monarchs or leading figures of the Reformation becomes a broader, ultra-local competition for power. The new plan’s architectural elements, therefore, are strongly related with Counter-Reformation propaganda.

Baroque facades, imposing obelisks and the first great European vistas are the best advertisement for one of the numerous contenders for the role of European leader, in the same way that the number of plots or the height of towers of an American tycoon are the means to claim primacy in modern Manhattan.

{ 04.f The Skyline } In 1873, the skyline of skyscrapers has not been formed yet, as evidenced by August Will’s aquarelle completed in that same year. Trinity Church still stands out in Whitman’s ‘city of spires and masts‘. In 1898 though, the church has been swallowed by prismatic volumes of various heights and sizes, claiming their spot in the sky, overthrowing once and for all the hierarchical skyline of the past. Residential and commercial towers have overshadowed the spires, while masts have been replaced by the smokestacks of steamships.

G

A comparison between this skyline and that of Rome of 1883 does not only attest to the obvious difference between a sacred and a profane city. It also entails a deeper problematic. Will’s aquarelle captures a unique snapshot of Manhattan, which would be radically different the following year if not month. Its dynamically changing skyline displays every new hierarchy as fragile and variable as the American dream that lies beneath it. On the other hand, Rome of 1883 is the same with the capital of previous or following years, even very similar to that of previous or following centuries. Always on the top of the skyline the domes of Baroque Rome stand, with the hills as their only contender. Not because they were impossible to surpass, but because they were chosen to endure as irrefutable evidence of a historic, catholic city.

{ 04.g A Nolli clash | St. Patrick’s Cathedral VS Sant’ Ignazio di Loyola } The catholic Cathedral of St. Patrick lies among the most iconic buildings in Manhattan and embodies the inherent contradiction which has been already suggested: a nostalgic reference to European roots and an emphatic adhesion to a renewed version of the old, bigger and better, are both present in the huge neo-gothic temple. Besides, its story abides by the rules imposed by the grid, as the land where it stands was bought by Jesuit monks in 1814. About two centuries before, in Baroque Rome, Jesuits had constructed, on land that was donated and not bought, a remarkably spacious church dedicated to Sant’Ignazio di Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. What really stands out, though, is the rococo square, designed in 1728, which extends the temple’s interior into the surrounding public space, with the ovoid facades of the five residential buildings across the church directly reflecting the endings of the three aisles.

If one attempted to examine the problematic of integration in the urban fabric, in the case of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, they would come to the conclusion that it is totally absent.

And that is because there is no intention whatsoever or even a slight possibility for something like that in the context of the grid. The temple submits to the Manhattan Grid. It is strictly contained within the boundaries of the block it occupies and stays 20

{ Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

N Sant’ Ignazio di Loyola and its square, pictured in Nolli’s map of 1748.

O St. Patrick’s Cathedral, placed inside its corresponding block, identical to the ones surrounding it

O

N

wide shut, as if it were an enterprise or a residential building. On the contrary, Sant’Ignazio Church is an extremely literal implementation of the urban theory depicted

by Giambattista Nolli on his celebrated map. In the extravagance of Piazza Sant’Ignazio’s rococo curves Rome’s conviction in the urban role of religion is more palpable than ever.

These two entirely different approaches to a church as an urban object lead to a general conclusion regarding the relation between public and private space. In Manhattan public space would be identified as a leftover, the negative of the built environment, whatever use it hosts. In other words, one would speak of a Cartesian network, whose axis function as distributors of movement. On the other side, in Rome public space is not a surplus but a complement, an extension of the interior space, equally designed and thoroughly structured. It is part of an ensemble of spaces which work together as regulators of movement. And churches stand among them.

In brief, Rome dictates an incessant, collective, urban pilgrimage, believers and nonbelievers included, while Manhattan encourages multiple, thoroughly subjective, personal quests. Spirituality is not excluded, but transformed into something closer to private, rather than public urban life.

{ 05. Between Cities } ‘Las Vegas was built in a day, or rather, the Strip was developed in a virgin desert in a short time.

It was not superimposed on an older pattern as were the pilgrim’s Rome of the Counter - Reformation [...] Each city vividly superimposes elements of a supranational scale on the local fabric : churches in the religious capital, casinos and their signs in the entertainment capital.’ ~ Learning from Las Vegas, 1972 33

The parallel examination and comparison of Rome and Manhattan shed light to the significant role of religion and economy as factors of urban change and regeneration, with road networks serving as a tool towards achieving this goal for planners in both historic examples. Even though the two cities continue to thrive and expand to the present, within their respective unique spatial and social contexts, their elemental urban structure remains the same. However, through this observation a new problematic rises.

33 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas, p. 18

Can these examples find their equivalent in contemporary city? More importantly, can these observations on historic urban development relate to the way cities will evolve in the future? To what extent is this change still influenced by religion, economy and road networks as stimulators?

As European and North American cities have reached a point of relative crystallisation, the focus has shifted from western urban centres to the new metropolises of developing economies. There, the supranational scale of which ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ spoke back in 1972 becomes more urgent than ever, as motorways surrounded by billboards, gates and other post-modern references become carriers of movement and speed, powerful symbols, organizing forces, as the obelisk or the grid once were. These infrastructures, true descendants of the Las Vegas Strip, emerge as potential case studies of contemporary urbanisation, within a paradoxically similar context as the aforementioned historic examples of Rome and Manhattan.

22

{ Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

P ‘Tan Hawaiian with Tanya’ – The famous Billboard on the Las Vegas Strip, 1972

Q ‘Heaven or Hell? _The Choice is yours’ – A religious camp’s Billboard advertisement at the Lagos - Ibadan Expressway, 2009

{ 05.a Lagos’ City of God } ‘If I went to Rome, we went from Rome to Las Vegas and then back again to Rome, then Rem Koolhaas has gone from Las Vegas to Lagos and thus has completed a circle’ ~ Denise Scott Brown, Supercrit #2, 2007 34 The book ‘Lagos: How it Works’, the result of a research project carried out as part of the ‘Harvard Project on the City’, was ready for publishing in 2007, after 8 years of research work, but the publication, for unclear reasons, was eventually canceled. ~ A short travelogue documentary was released in 2001 as part of the ongoing research project, titled ‘Lagos Wide and Close’. It is a collaboration between Rem Koolhaas, who narrates the film, and director Bregtje van der Haak.

35 Rem Koolhaas, ‘Dump Space: Freedom From Order’, Article on ‘Wired 11’, 2003

36 Asonzeh Ukah, Redeeming Urban Spaces: The Ambivalence of Building a Pentecostal City in Lagos, Nigeria, p. 182

37 Images of the walls and gates of the religious camps can be found in ‘The Lagos Strip’ collection, made by photographers Helmut Weber and Sabine Bitter, as part of their project ‘All will be Well’, 2011

Denise Scott Brown, in her critical re-evaluation of ‘Learning from Las Vegas’, acknowledges the impact of their work in Las Vegas, visible in the efforts of younger architects to understand urbanity, while giving special mention to Rem Koolhaas’ unpublished research on the city of Lagos, Nigeria, around the year 2000 34. Observing the city centre from above, Koolhaas saw in its coastal skyline the image of an early Manhattan, the spatial disorder of an urban centre undergoing restless construction activity 35. In the wider Lagos Conurbation area around 21 million people live and work daily, amidst a landscape of continuous conflicts, unstable political scenery and religious heterogeneity.

Situated within this unique context, a series of strange walls and high gates rise on both sides of the Lagos – Ibadan Expressway, the basic road infrastructure connecting the two largest metropolitan areas in Nigeria, passing through a seemingly uninhabited, barren landscape. Here, between the two cities’ outskirts, urban densification has given its place to a new strange formation, simply known as ‘City of God’ 36. Since the 1980s, an expanding cluster of religious camps have been transforming this vast area on the verge of urbanization, marking their presence with walls and high gates along the highway 37. They are properties of mainly Pentecostal and secondarily Muslim religious groups, centres for the promotion of faith, which present themselves as holy cities, while at the same time being multinational profit organizations. They cannot be strictly regarded as part of either of the two cities surrounding them, even though they rely on the infrastructure which connects them, a vital element for their expansion and further domination in this otherwise unchartered territory.

{ 05.b An Unlikely Comparison } 38 Asonzeh Ukah, Redeeming Urban Spaces: The Ambivalence of Building a Pentecostal City in Lagos, Nigeria, Field research for ‘Global Prayers’, p. 179 ~ The project ‘Global Prayers: Contemporary Manifestations of the Religious in the City’, was carried out during the years 2009 - 12 and the results were thoroughly presented in a printed edition of 2014, of the same title. It was a collaboration between metroZones – Center for Urban Affairs and HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) in Berlin, and involved a series of articles and individual research projects examining the presence of the religious element in contemporary cities, as well as its spatial impact on them.

T R The interior space of RCCG’s great auditorium, is in fact a vast rectangular area filled with chairs and covered by a metallic roof construction, with a total length of 1000 meters at its long side S Satellite image of the RCCG camp, where the overwhelming size of the central auditorium, along with its parking lot, is visible as compared to other structures

When members visit the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) organization, the largest of the religious camps, they move on from the inter-city space to the microcosm of a gated, organized community. This confined area consists of every element a regular city does, including a network of streets, residential areas, healthcare and administrative facilities 38. At its centre, a great auditorium made of metal, serves as the main religious space, where thousands of believers gather and participate in the weekly masses. Every time they park their cars in the vast parking space in front of the huge construction, an area which also serves as a place of prayer and spiritual preparation before the mass. This parking lot attests to the dominant role of the religious building it serves. In other words, it becomes itself a ritualised space, like the one Venturi saw in Las Vegas casinos’ parking lots.

In an attempt for an unlikely comparison, the composition of the vast central auditorium with its supporting parking lot could be regarded as similar to the way that Sant’Ignazio di Loyola’s church in Rome and its corresponding square served as an example of the continuation of religious space in the public realm. The simple rectangular shape of the auditorium and its typical construction system, devoid of any architectural references, find a fitting supplementary element in the basic shape of the parking lot. Their analogy is, however, doomed to failure. Nearly 60 churches of Sant Ignazio’s size could fit under the huge metal roof of RCCG’s great auditorium. The camp’s main religious building, fueled by freedom of space and the massive amount of people gathering during services, has turned into a structure of unprecedented scale. { Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

23

P

Q

R

S

T

38 J.B.Jackson, A Sense of Place, Α Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press,1994)

A search for the origin of these contradictions leads to a clear common source, the same one that gave birth to them and continues to nourish them on the edge of Lagos. These camps are the current products of a religious economy. A new form of ‘inter - city’ pilgrimage fuelled by them takes place between cities, its spirituality lying within the dynamic movement of pilgrims, who decisively crowd the highways and the unconventional worlds hiding behind the walled facades. What is this new pilgrimage’s destination? Maybe it is the highway itself, the meeting point of thousands of pilgrims waiting through endless traffic jams. As J. B. Jackson wrote in ‘A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time’: ‘Roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places’ 39, a phrase that adequately describes the essence of this emerging urban form.

‘From Religious Economy…’

In Rome of Counter-Reformation, the city was rebuilt based upon its strong religious significance. It followed the vision of a single religious leader and an urban plan consisting of intersecting vistas, which linked the scattered churches – destinations of Christian pilgrimage. Manhattan on the other hand, was founded on the philosophy of capitalism, adopting a neutralising design pattern, while sacred references existed mainly to serve the dominant financial development and hierarchy of the city. The religious camps of Lagos under those terms could be regarded as an amalgam of the two cities, being at the same time pilgrimage destinations and products of consumerism, keeping a complete balance between the religious and the economic element. In their case, a new form of religious economy has emerged, both similar to that of European and American cities, but also quite unique in its expression and nature.

‘…to Road Networks’ V

T

How many Sant’ Ignazios, along with their corresponding squares, would be needed in order to fill the area of RCCG’s central auditorium and its parking lot?

U The Sacred element’s route : from the city’s center, to the periphery and back to the center of these emerging, inter - city formations.

V From the Road as organizational element, to the road as a space of no reference and finally to the road as a destination itself.

The Vistas in Sixtus’s Rome are designed by absolute force of a single authority, which envisions, finances and oversees the construction of a new city stepping on the ruins of an old one. The roads are a testament to the Popes’ unparalleled power as religious but also political figures. They connect squares with churches and obelisks, but eventually become themselves a dominating organisational element of the city. In Manhattan, the repetitiveness and neutrality of the Grid successfully reflects the absence of reference dictated by Protestant ethics. The road network of identical Streets and Avenues has become the predominant public space, an area of individual, unobstructed movement, where no single point of reference is stronger than the others and the religious element constitutes only a small fraction of a city driven by continuous financial development.

In the space between cities, the Lagos – Ibadan Expressway, a variation of the American Highway, is quite different from Rome’s Vistas or Manhattan’s Streets and Avenues, but as successful in its ability to produce space and give birth to new urban forms.

~ In the end, road networks, either part of a city or a destination themselves, along with religious economies as driving forces behind them, shape and transform urbanism in a single narrative through time and space, pointing the way for theorists and practitioners alike to enhance their perception of future cities.

{ Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

27

U

{ Bibliography }

Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (original title: L’ Architettura della citta), University Studio Press, 1991 David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) Edmund N. Bacon, Design of cities (New York: The Vikings Press, 1968) Hilary Ballon (editor), The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992) Jochen Becker, Katrin Klingan, Stephan Lanz, and Kathrin Wildner (editors), Global Prayers: Contemporary Manifestations of the Religious in the City, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, metroZones, Europa-Universitat Viadrina (Zurich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2014) Le Corbusier, When the cathedrals were white, trans. Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964) Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Taylor & Francis e-Library, Routledge Classics, 2005) Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959) Pier Vittorio Aureli (editor), The City as a Project (Berlin: Ryby Press, 2013) Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994) Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992) Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977) Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a new Tradition, Third edition-Revised and Enlarged (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959) Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban patterns and Meanings Through History (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1991) Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) Reuben Skye Rose-Redwood, Rationalizing the Landscape: Superimposing the Grid upon the Island of Manhattan, Thesis in Geography, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University, 2002

{ Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

29

V

{ magazines, articles } MONU #10, Holy Urbanism, February 2009, Editor in Chief: Bernd Upmeyer, MONU magazine on urbanism, Rotterdam: Board Publishers Uncube, Magazine No. 01, Pilgrimage & the Architect, August 2012, Editor in Chief: Sophie Lovell, Uncube digital magazine for architecture and beyond, Berlin: BauNetz Allan Ceen and James Tice, Rioni: The Districts of Rome, nolli.uoregon.edu Allyn Gaestel, The Road Through Redemption Camp: Religion, Fertility and Abortion in Lagos, May 18, 2014, Los Angeles Review of Books, lareviewofbooks.org Andrew Rice, Mission from Africa, April 8, 2009, The New York Times Magazine, nytimes.com Carlos Fuentes, The Milky Way: The Heretic’s Progress, The Criterion Collection, criterion.com Denise Scott Brown, Invention and Tradition, American Architecture: Innovation and Tradition, (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), mascontext.com Interview with architect Rem Koolhaas, Lagos Wide and Close, April 4, 2014, Rotterdam, submarinechannel.com James Panero, The Greatness of the Grid, March 23, 2012, City Journal, maga zine of urban affairs, Manhattan Institute, city-journal.org James Tice, The Forgotten Landscape of Rome: The Disabitato, nolli.uoregon.edu John B. Jackson, The Word Itself, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, 1984 Mark Polizzotti, The Milky Way: Easy Striders, The Criterion Collection, criterion.com Nick Paumgarten, The Mannahatta Project, October 1, 2007, The New Yorker, newyorker.com

{ image sources }

B

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro_delle_Sette_Chiese

D

https://www.bergbook.com/htdocs/Cache555.htm

E

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://metmuseum.org/collection

F

The New York Public Library, digitalcollections.nypl.org

H

National Museum of American History, scienceservice.si.edu/pages/027043.htm

J

Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu/html_m/p/pinadell/index.html

K

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gouverneur_Morris.jpg

M http://thegreatestgrid.mcny.org/greatest-grid/surveying-the-city/25#map P

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas

Q Emeka Udemba, God is a Nigerian, MONU #10, Holy Urbanism S

Satellite image from Google Earth

{ Rome, Manhattan _ From religious economies to road networks }

31

~ Designed in 02/2018