CASE STUDY

Grand Mosque of Rome. PAOLO PORTOGHESI, 1995

Layered Identities

But just as designs that intend congeniality with place overlook opportunities for creative transformation, those that import something new to the place, something developed in isolation from existing conditions and constraints, also miss the point.

DAVID LEATHERBARROW, BUILDING IN AND OUT OF PLACE, 2015

The Mosque of Rome seamlessly weaves the identity of the city, a minority religion, and the values of the present generation into a unique variant of the typology custom tailored for its time and place. The mosque repurposes the ma or urban surfaces that define the city of Rome, its cobblestones, travertine marble, and Roman brick. These surfaces that make up the majority of exterior urban space in Rome become the defining façade and ground surfaces of the mosque, turning the city fabric into the building fabric. Likewise, Portoghesi abstracts the iconic parasol tree of Rome and its distinct top heavy branching patterns into the mosque’s columns throughout the exteriors and interiors.

I am my

Rather than cloning the visual details of a typical mosque, the values behind Islamic traditions are preserved but redrawn in the image of the present generation. The aesthetics of infinity and complexity that drive traditional Islamic arts are remade into modern aesthetics and construction. The dome of the main prayer hall and the endless colonnades follow the intents of Islamic art to draw out serenity through infinite and complex patterns.

Case Studies

National Museum of Roman Art, Rafael Moneo, 1986

Igualada Cemetery, Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos, ~1984

Copy The Physicality Of Memory

The powerfully emotive image of the Saynatsalo Town Hall is a condensed image of a hill town, reminiscent of familiar childlike images in Medieval paintings... the image of a town projects a greater wealth of narratives and emotions than that of a single building.

Juhani Pallasmaa writes on Aalto’s Saynatsalo Town Hall that Aalto captures the sensations of a small mountainside village town. Navigating the town hall feels as if one is walking through a a small town. The town hall lacks the visual kitsch hallmarks of a village like gabled roofs or chimneys. The town hall resembles a village in its clustering of small buildings up and down a terraced slope with streetlike walks. Pallasmaa observes that architecture has more power when it taps into the physicality of a memory rather than its visual details.

National Museum of Roman Art

1 - Roman Aqueduct of Merida

2 - Nave of museum

3 - Street Facade

4 - Street perspective

Igualada Cemetery

5 - Cemetery terraces against blue marls cliffs

The National Museum of Roman Art exists in a town littered with vestiges of a Roman colony. The museum steals the sensations of Roman construction but none of the visual hallmarks. The museum imitates the mass, weight, verticality, and relentless repetition seen in the town’s Roman ruins, but none of the exquisite detail of Roman ornament on display in the museum. Instead, the museum draws on our collective memories of Roman ruins as solemn structures whose details that been eroded away in time.

At the urban scale, the museum aspires to the grandeur of the ruins but fits in seamlessly with the small town. The museum mimics the shifting piecemeal patterns of its neighbors even though it shares little visual resemblance.

The Igualada cemetery is a microcosm of its larger landscape. It is not a clone of its surroundings but instead an intensified, compressed rendition of the surrounding river gorge and dried basin. The architects began with a deep cut into the landscape into which they transformed retaining walls into cliffs, plateaus, and deep gorges.

Case Studies

National Museum of Roman Art, Rafael Moneo, 1986

Igualada Cemetery, Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos, ~1984 foils and contrasts

ARTIFICIAL / NATURAL TOMB / RIVER GORGE PERMANENCE / DECAY

LIGHT / HEAVY SCAFFOLDING / RUINS MODERN / ARCHAIC

Igualada Cemetery

Foils in literature are two characters whose opposite personalities complement and bring out the best in each other. In architecture, the use of opposites and contrasts heighten the character and perception of both elements.

The Igualada cemetery is a dialogue between artificial and natural. There are two tectonics across the site, rusted gabions that bend and dissolve into the earth, and individual modular concrete tombs that are built up into large catacombs that resist the earth. The retaining walls oscillate between projecting out of the earth versus decaying and becoming the earth. The journey through the cemetery is similar to that of transversing archaic temple ruins, moments of permanence through stone punctured by erosion of vegetation and time. This articulates a tension between inevitable decay and the permanence of memory.

In the National Museum of Roman Art, there are two juxtaposed tectonic systems: the archaic, heavy, arch and buttress Roman construction and the light, thin, steel walkways. The archaic heavy system holds a rigid order across the buildings, while the steel structure zips through the buildings. The steel in contrast to the archaic construction sets up a narrative sensation of walking around on scaffolding in an old ruin.

Case Studies

Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi, 1883~2026

Igualada Cemetery, Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos, ~1984

Marking Time 4

We are equally frightened of being left outside the progression of time as being lost in the anonymity and meaninglessness of space... Consequently, architecture has to create a specificity of space and place, and at the same time, evoke the experience of a temporal continuum.

JUHANI PALLASMAA, THE SPACE OF TIME, 1998

Sagrada Familia

1 - St. John modernist alcove

2 - St. Mary Gothic alcove

3 - West entry facade

4 - East entry facade

Igualada Cemetery

5 - “Falling” ceiling

6 - Individual tombs

7 - Gabions merging into the land

3

Pallasmaa argues that architecture helps us find our place in the long stream of time; Architecture should respond to place specifically but engage us in time broadly. The Sagrada Familia marks the passage of time where Barcelona’s shift from Gothic Revival to Modernist arts such as cubism are seen in changing visual languages

4 throughout the building. The older Gothic facades are paired across the nave with contemporary cubist facades. In doing so, a visitor can see and participate in the evolving timeline of the city.

participating in the passage of time, in erosion, weathering and decay

When weathering and decay are made visible, visitors participate in the larger timeline of the site, rather than their individual moment. The Igualada Cemetery is a built as a ruin, such as the “falling ceiling” in its covered exterior space. Some tombs hold steadfast or even project out of the earth, still immaculate through time. Other tombs and terraces of the cemetery are overtaken by nature and decay, playing out a struggle between human permanence and the inevitability of erosion and decay. The effects of time are made visible for a grieving visitor to partake in.

Case Study

Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi, 1883~2026

Sagrada Familia

1 - Thin tile masonry in Sagrada

Familia sacristy

2 - Typical example of thin tile masonry craft of the Catalan region

3 - New modernist basilica structure

4 - Traditional basilica in Barcelona, St Maria del Mar

5 + 6 - Modern faceted geometries in masonry

Light filled ceiling due to new structural system in contrast to darkness of traditional basilica in fig 4

Critical regionalism has often repurposed local crafts as a means of connecting to the specifics of place, such as the works of Carlo Scarpa in the Italian Veneto region or the contemporary works of Wang Shu in China. Gaudi gave the masonry crafts of Barcelona new geometric languages of modernity, creating faceted, primitivist, cubist forms as well as fluid, muscular, pleated forms, progressing the craft past its gothic aesthetics with new languages for modernity. Yet, Gaudi surpasses merely giving old crafts new looks. He spent his career experimenting with the thin tile Catalan masonry, fig. 1 and

2. He gave the basilica typology a new structural expression relevant to the skyscraper age, believing a modern basilica should be light filled instead of the darkness of the Gothic tradition. Through marrying modern graphic static methods with Catalan masonry crafts, he created a basilica in the image of a light-filled forest, a basilica specific to its time and place.