Episodic Urbanisms Pratt Undergraduate Architecture in Rome by viaARCHITECTURE

EPISODIC URBANISMS Pratt Undergraduate Architecture in Rome

Introduction Erika Hinrichs

Ariadnes Thread: Unspooling the Labyrinth Frederick Biehle

COLLECTION 20

Documentation and Beyond: Collecting and Recording the Urban Condition Richard Piccolo

Reorienting Rome: Space Myth Wilderness Jeffrey Hogrefe

SPECULATION 68

Precedent Studies and Speculative Itineraries

Marcato di Traiano Torre Adriana/Castel S. Angelo Monumento al Vittorio Emmanuelle II Piazza Arocoelli/S. Maria in Aracoelli/Campidoglio Via di Porta San Pancrazio/Aqua Paola Via di S. Pietro in Montorio Piazza Quirinale/via del Quirinale

165 Vedere e Farsi Vedere: Rome and the Education of the Architect Ryszard Sliwka

PROPOSITION 174 Proposals for the Capitoline Hill Overlooking the Imperial Forums 233 Catalogue of Episodic Projects 246 Credits

La Grande Pianta di Roma, Gianbattista Nolli, 1748

Introduction Erika Hinrichs, UA Chair and Professor for the Rome Program

The work included in this publication is not actually the program’s most current, so its publication as a part of the Rome program’s 40th anniversary, where we are celebrating the longer arc of the program’s influence, may be quite appropriate. What this body of work offers is a presentation of what has been a critical and enduring pedagogy, a bit like the city itself. In this sense the thinking that goes into this book can still be understood to accurately reflect the intentions of the program today. The first publication on the Rome program, InProcess Rome, was released in 2004 and recounted the early steps of the program as it evolved from a travel studio into a full 18 credit semester abroad, along with the design studio’s integration into the larger curricular matrix for the UG Architecture Professional Degree Program. Following that first publication, several modest changes would generate another transformation, the most important being the program’s size. As student demand increased so the number of studios followed suit increasing from two to three. Thus in 2006 Frederick Biehle, Anthony Caradonna and I all were able to travel to Rome for the semester with the intention of introducing a more comprehensive urban problem that could learn from the experiences we had all garnered by intermittently teaching in Rome over the previous eight years. Episodic Urbanisms, the content that this publication represents, was the result of that effort. Rome had been a location that quite naturally resisted the shift to a reliance on digital tools. It was already the place (and still is) that students looked forward to for drawing by hand, which carried over into the studio. As a mostly technology-free zone back then it was a new idea to require that one bring a laptop on which to work. The new pedagogy we introduced intended to fully embrace the digital but to put it to use in a way that might complement rather than compete with the long standing analog sensibility.

The work of the program is presented in three sections, described here as Collection, Speculation and Proposition. Collection is more a continuation of past semesters, asking the students to record and subsequently collect by way of drawing, photographing, and analyzing the plethora of spatial consequences they come in to contact with during the semester- from the sectional cut and fill of Matera to the platonic geometry along the urban armature of Mantova to the multiple confrontations and resolutions embedded within the fabric of Rome itself. Speculation is something else, a selective examination of the interconnections and critical linkages that exist between specific spatial moments that when gathered together form a nearly seamless, porous pedestrian experience. Here is where the digital formatting was fully exploited, asking students to speculate on the nature of the invention by variation and recalibration of the existing. Proposition remains consistent with the demands of a fourth year options studio, whether in Brooklyn or Rome. Of course the difference here is the context. I still believe that the reason we are in Rome in the first place is to examine as closely as we can its historical context. And what better way to do that than to propose a new contemporary structure into its midst. With some luck the potential significance of place, any place, will rub off and it will alter the way in which a student (or even professional) begins to approach future projects. In spite of the increase in studios, the program has retained its uniqueness for a number of reasons, but smallness, and the singularity of the group is one of them. The students get that it is important to act collectively. They all take the same classes, live in the same apartments, eat at the same restaurants, travel on the same bus. They need to act as a single group, and the more they

embrace this the better it is for everyone. No longer operating institutionally every student must look out for every other student. They/we become more of a family. The family atmosphere is made quite literal by the proximity and helicoptering of the director’s wife and Italian professor, Emanuela Ricciardi. Located on the floor above the studio, the Piccolo’s and their daughter were always available to the students for consultation, commiseration, and mediation with the trials that come with both growing up and living in a different and sometimes less familiar than it seems culture. Emanuela has been a part of the Pratt program for as nearly as long as her husband Richard, and without question, their attention and personal investment has had a direct impact on the confidence and ultimately success of the program. In the years represented by this book did the program clarify its pedagogical position. Episodic Urbanisms was initially introduced in 2006 as a way to examine the city. Rome’s historic fabric, which is so inherently spatial, was difficult to capture three dimensionally, and so the idea of a reversal was determined, modeling its spaces as if objects. The transformational variations proliferated. And the conversations around the pedagogical process were commented on and contributed to by our fellow critics from other programs. Finding an appropriate site to operate with was more difficult. The open area at the base of the Capitoline Hill had been utilized quite recently. Anthony wanted something with ruins. We all wanted something with a sectional challenge. And so Fred selected the ultimate non-site site, the rear-side of the Capitoline hill, rubble strewn, loosely filled, a bit hard to get a grasp of. Teaching this site proved quite challenging as its sectional translation can be beguiling.

But we repeated the studio a second, third, and fourth time so that in 2010 when the city of Rome staged a celebration of architecture week, and one part that event requested the participation of Foreign Schools of Architecture, the work was ready. As I like to say when introducing the work of InProcess, this book represents everyone even if not every student has a project included. The nature of what is presented, I am sure, will be a trigger for the recall of a more personal experience on everyone’s behalf.

Pratt UG Architecture Rome Program Exhibition panels for the FAR presentation at the Temple of Hadrian, June 2010

Pianta Topografica Di Roma Antica, Luigi Canina, 1850

Ariadne’s Thread: Unspooling In the Labyrinth Frederick Biehle, Adjunct Professor and Program Coordinator, Pratt Institute School of Architecture

Taxonomies I am tracing my way through the history of western architecture by looking at a copy of Denkmaler der Kunst (Monuments of Art).1 This rather sizable and authoritative document has been passed on to me by my family, having originally been purchased by my great grandfather, a decorative craftsman by trade who emigrated to the United States from southern Germany in 1880. What was once his book of unbound plates (for easier reference I assume) is a true survey in the great nineteenth century tradition, a presentation of artistic and architectural monuments taxonometrically organized by style and period. The works are represented orthographically- in plan, in elevation, and in section, but also with interior and exterior perspectives, often without context. The drawings are remarkably refined and precise. There are 186 plates of outline engravings and seven chromo-lithographs in all. It suggests thoroughness and completeness. Hierarchically, the more important monuments receive either larger images or the reservation of an entire page. The lesser projects are presented collectively, compressed together with similar structures. As a publication, it is a testament to the idea of the undertaking itself which ultimately has produced a work of such great beauty. My fascination with the means of representation can, for the moment, mask the inherent problems with the methodology itself. I am dissimilarly reminded of the very first book on architectural history to enter my personal library, Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method.2 It is also an art historical survey which I purchased to be the primary reference book for my introductory course to architectural history. That course was also a survey, intended to present the monuments of western architectural history in systematic progression, identified principally by their location in time but also by the culture that produced them. Beginning with the Egyptians, Sir Bannister moved briefly to the West-

ern Asiatics, then to the Greeks, and from there to the Romans and Byzantines, after which French, British, Italian, Dutch, or Spanish nationalities were introduced with the succeeding phases of Gothic, Renaissance, Neoclassical, Beaux Arts and finally Modern Architecture in the Americas. By the time of my purchase the methodology of the survey was very much tried and true. It was also something that had translated quite well to the lecture course, particularly with the advent of the 35mm slide and high resolution projected image, perfectly suited for presentations to assembled classes that could number in the hundreds. A survey of civilization reflected through its architectural monuments could be compressed into 26 lectures over two semesters and displayed in roughly 2500 images. 3 I don’t think I ever fully appreciated my copy of Banister Fletcher as we called it. But, why should I have? At that time, I was unaware of the fact that my edition was already its 17th, or that its first iteration, published all the way back in 1896, had been a much more refined effort. The process of updating had replaced engravings with photographs and reduced the folio format to a more manageable 9 1/2” x 6 1/4” dimension. At 1366 pages this was a book neither to read nor to even much look at but simply to consult in the process of memorizing dates and styles, whether Greek Temples, Roman Baths, Gothic Cathedrals or Renaissance Palaces. No wonder then, that this particular book, still on my bookshelf, is really more a symbol for a kind of historical education, sitting as it has been lifeless and untouched for the past 40 years. In hindsight, the historical survey would seem a rather unfortunate method for connecting a young architect to the culture that had come before him/her and into which he/she was entering. Yet, in the year 2000, now in its 20th edition, Banister Fletcher received an award as the AIA Book of the Century.

Plate from Denkmater der Kunst, Lubke and Lutzow, 1883 Plates from A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, Bannister Fletcher, 17th edition, 1967

Alberto Perez Gomez, speaking about the role of history and education when interviewed by Saundra Weddle and Marc Neveu for the Journal of Architectural Education in 2011 had this to say: There is some real reason for the dissatisfaction (with history) that exists. It stems from a general misunderstanding of what history can provide the future or practicing architect. The origin of this problem can be pinpointed historically. This is useful because it means that the situation we face has not always been the same. There are many aspects to this. The first issue is that our understanding of history as styles or typologies comes from the beginning of the nineteenth century. One can find the origins of this by tracing its own precedents. Knowing this, we are not condemned to understand history in those terms. This moment reduced the field of architectural history to a history of buildings organized according to formal taxonomies or stylistic characteristics. This was very unfortunate but it has stuck, generally, in the teaching and practice of architecture. When one understands the history of architecture in those terms it becomes easy to dismiss it because we don’t go very far with it… In a certain way, the understanding of history by historians has been problematic since its inception. So that is one of the major tasks that we have to try to grapple with. How does one then go about reconnecting and finding appropriate ways to connect history to design?... What is at stake is more than form. Architectural programs have political consequences. What one learns from historical precedents, from the stories we tell about the stuff that we admire in the past, is that it can be translated into our own questions and allow us to act in an ethical way.4 Perez-Gomez politely points to the taxonometric survey’s failure. He is quite clear that history carries the lessons that go well beyond architecture’s formal concerns. It teaches us about ourselves,

about who we are in relationship to the larger society. It can communicate concepts such as respect, consideration, understanding, even humility not to mention admiration, arrogance, and the uses and abuses of power and authority. If the connection can be made, the student will ultimately see him/herself quite differently, as an integrated participant in the shaping of our human condition and not merely a passive observer. Their work takes on the possibility of contributing to something that is much greater than themselves. Cohered Organism Two generations ago there was a protracted debate over how best to re-introduce the values of history that Modernism had rejected. Even the project of Postmodernism seems quaint today, as history, after working its way back in, has been rejected once more. Throughout all this time the methodology of the survey as the principal instrument for the teaching of history has remained. Coincidence? I would say that for the typical student history still stands disconnected from design, isolated, like that book on the bookshelf. In the 1970s and 80s Colin Rowe’s urban speculations with his Cornell University design studios came to pre-eminence academically. He was examining the lessons of the past more abstractly, turning them into tactical spatial strategies for resolving contemporary problems of urban design. This culminated with a book coauthored with his student, Fred Koetter, Collage City. As should be understood from the book’s title, it was celebrating the hybrid and the combinatory. It placed the sociologist Karl Popper’s understanding of the fragmentary and contingent nature of the discovery of knowledge together with Lionel Trilling’s definition of the humanists’ contradictory and dialectical view of society. In architectural terms, change will introduce an incremental and contingent subversion of the status quo, effecting it by way of the discourse

Plates from Edifices de Rome Moderne, Paul Letarouilly, 1840-57

between ideal types and imperfect contexts, thus reflecting the larger contradictions and oppositions that characterize human existence.5 The book concludes with a catalogue of urban elements, ideal set pieces and combinatory strategies for consideration and application. No project or precedent was more important for Rowe than G.B. Nolli’s Grand Plan of Rome from 1748. The carefully interwoven pattern of Rome’s architecture and urbanism combined with Nolli’s particular method of representation offered an implicit critique of modernism (and the historical survey) still proselytizing for the ideal building as a freestanding object set in indeterminate open space. The Grand Plan suggested instead that the city had to be understood as a hybrid organism, a series of innumerable events aggregated and interconnected over time, rather than beholden to a singular rationalized idea.6 Paul Letarouilly’s Edifices de Rome Modern, itself a 19th century survey, had already served to test this theory by applying a selective and more detailed examination to Nolli’s Grand Plan. Published in a folio format with exquisite engraved drawings it was an exercise in French enlightenment precision based on clarity and reason. Its three volumes were issued between 1840 and 1857 and contained 354 engraved plates. It concentrated on late Renaissance and Baroque architecture but also included certain 19th century buildings and many early Christian Basilicas as well. Widely circulated in the last half of the 19th century, as a direct result of Rowe’s influence, it would find new currency in the late 20th century as well.7 While Letarouilly was interested in the measured architectural survey and in documenting the more recent interventions that had a value for the contemporary practice of architecture, the impulse to examine those projects in isolation never took hold. Instead, he en-

Way finding exercise, Pratt Rome students, 1998 Paul Letarouilly, Updated Nolli Plan of Rome published together with his Edifices de Rome Moderne

gaged in representing them in their true urban context, often with local site plans, and perspectives within the surrounding fabric. Letarouilly also included a faithful reproduction of Nolli’s Grand Plan, updated to include projects completed post-1748. Even with the taxonometric sensibility of the survey, Letarouilly could not divorce himself from the fully integrated reality of the place. The architecture of the city was too fully cohered. Rome, then, might seem to be exactly what Alberto Perez Gomez was calling for. It is the anti-survey, a teaching tool that demands a firsthand experience from which to learn. Because both city and building are fundamentally interdependent, and because within its fabric one finds over two millennia of architectural evolution, it offers the student a very different set of possibilities for connecting history to design and to understanding its ultimate ethical value. Labyrinthine Pedagogy Pratt institute’s Undergraduate Architecture department has had a spring semester Rome Program since 1978. In 1998 I was asked to both coordinate the curriculum and teach the design studio for that program. It had been ten years since my fellowship year at the American Academy and I looked forward to renewing my engagement with the city. In meeting my students for the first time, I decided spontaneously to use their absence of knowledge as an asset so as to examine the city at a more immediate and personal scale. My request to them was to perform a way-finding exercise by reading and following the physical clues that the historical city was prone to offer. They were to “feel their way”, using space and buildings as a blind man would use brail. Each student selected a destination but not a specific route to get there. Finding one’s way would need to be the result of a cumula-

tively assembled series of encounters, passing through a series of smaller piazzas and streets, each of which exhibited its own particular characteristics. Unfolding and recording their path was intended to preserve the memory of that episodic experience. The student was assuming the role of Theseus entering Minos’ labyrinth. The act of drawing the path was like his unspooling of Ariadne’s golden thread, making a record that could allow a retracing of the experience back to what they already knew. From within the Campo Marzio the way forward can certainly be puzzling, even frustrating to a foreign student. The urban medieval fabric is in no way familiar and defies systemic comprehension. Instead, understanding aspects of the larger whole must come from an ability to piece together knowledge of specific local conditions. The way forward is more of a “sidewalk ballet”, seeking out and following the city’s critical actors.8 Within this tactile experience of the living city, one finds something else- a public realm that continuously anticipates and acknowledges one’s presence and participation, its architectural frame crafted and enlivened by human-scale details, all woven into its vernacular as well as its more celebrated architecture. The cumulative urban experience is a poignant assertion on the value of being human. This is the deeper more resonant lesson of Rome. All of my subsequent pedagogy for the Pratt Rome Program would relate back to this initial way-finding exercise.9 Rome’s spatial uniqueness is both subtle and monumental. A city punctuated with over 900 churches, each of them plays an incremental role in contributing to its larger urban pattern. With its short cadences between narrow streets and widened piazzas interlocking together into an organic jigsaw puzzle, it oscillates back and forth between open and closed, narrow and wide, sunlit and shadowed, creating an episodic interweaving. Underlying this is its seeming contradiction, the nearly superseding presence of antiqui-

G.B. Nolli, Grand Plan of Rome, detail of Campo Marzio Plan of Imperial Rome

ty, which, when it ruptures the ground plane, throws all knowledge of place into doubt. The simple task of finding one’s way can grow to seem ever more profound and contradictory, initiating a spell and an ultimately unending quest, to follow the desire to know ever more. The Lesson of Imperial Rome Even as the experience of Rome introduces the student to a wholly new and contradictory form of urbanism, it was for the Pratt student at least, not a wholly new concept. The course, The Legacy of Roman Urbanism had already introduced them to the notion of an urban narrative conveyed by a city’s principal spatial figure.10 Following William MacDonald’s outline from The Architecture of the Roman Empire, Vol 2, an Urban Appraisal11 the ancient city was presented as a dialectic between solid and void, public building types and spatial armature, geometrically defined figures utilizing symmetry, axiality and frontality and the more inventively shaped open spaces that they always supported, all working together so as to offer an idea for urbanism that was about community and communality. Any simple summary of the Roman architectural achievement will attest that its principle defining characteristic is its “interiority”its extensive and varied use of interior space and “active” exterior space.12 Roman architecture distinguished itself by its awareness and formal articulation of the space and form of enclosure. Open spaces were always recognized and articulated together with the buildings that fixed their boundaries. It was the space between buildings that presented a city’s first recognizable feature- the street. The street was the active exterior space that communicated most directly, even before an actual building or building interior could provide a concluding statement. In fact, it was the exterior space that established a city’s primary urban form, the core that William McDonald defined as a spatial armature. Made up of the

primary streets, the forum, and the spaces between them together with the principal institutions and public buildings, the space of the armature was the city. Starting at the city gate, the spatial sequence of movement was expected to lead to the forum, and from the forum to the other principal destinations. The armature was also the space of congregational gathering and the space for gathering, by virtue of its being larger and open, was what provided the architectural opportunity for connecting and resolving the differences and discrepancies between topography and context. The open space of the armature was a continuously linked together set of episodic sequences, a conduit for uninterrupted passage as well as accessibility to its most important buildings. Over the course of the empire, as cities grew, expanded, became denser and more ambitious, armatures also became more complex and idiosyncratic, yet they always retained the recognizable idea of interconnectedness. Their shapes and forms always delivered and in this way did the figured sensibility act to portray the Roman city. Before Roman urbanism, grand avenues with architectural borders were essentially unknown. When they did exist, they were built chiefly by Kings and Pharaohs for their own ceremonial appearances. The threshold to urban, civilized life was the city gate. Once inside, the road transformed to become the main street framed by a bordering colonnade or portico. Roman thoroughfares would be the first truly arterial streets built for whole communities and their everyday public business. It might be possible to say that the dignity of a civic life in antiquity is best expressed by this idea of the street as a sheltered and colonnaded place of passage. For a society to have focused its resources on the embellishment

Figure Ground Plan and Armature Plan of Djemila, North Africa

of the path between here and there seems existentially a most profound act. It identifies the most banal task of the citizensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; routinethat of going from point a to point b, of being between things, of getting there- as worthy of an architectural definition that is equal to the architecture of the destination itself. It says life is not just about what is there, it is about the experience of getting there. The armaturesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; boundary was also articulated by a collection of complementary elements that marked the significant points of transition along its way. Triumphal arches, gates, fountains, exedras, way stations; they all served the purpose of contributing to the formal resolution and shaping of the spatial armatureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s form, maintaining its constant sense of interiority. These elements were always located logically, complementing and completing both the formal architectural language and the spatial logic of the city. Like the embellishment of the street, they were concerned with furthering a program of civic identity. They communicate a pronounced and sophisticated understanding of what makes for a fully integrated and porous public realm, and provides for it with a generous spirit. The armature, with its connective architecture, gave each city its own unique underlying, spatial and organizational pattern. The episodic dialogue between the various elements of the armature, the relationships established by one form and its attendant spaces, by a form and its directional focus, by a more ideal intention and its compromised resolution must be understood to embody the intrinsic meaning of the architecture itself whose ultimate product was the visible and fully accessible city. To achieve this powerful effect of a united, available totality, it was not by the imposition of an authoritarian order, a geometric rule, but simply by the absence of unresolved diversity, of egregious incompletion within the boundary of the urban experience.

Episodic Armatures Rome the capital city was, of course, never planned as a military camp or colonial four square grid together with a clearly evident spatial armature. It evolved from its origins along the Tiber and atop its principal hills into a far more complex whole. As such, its third century form exhibited more the characteristics of an emergent system than anything hierarchically planned.13 What one finds instead is the spatial armature at a more incremental scale, where localized resolution generates a consistent overall interconnectedness. The evolution of the Imperial Forums is the perfect analogy to the city as a whole evolving gradually over 150 years under five different emperors, each of its forum spaces individually unique, adaptive, locally resolved, even non-hierarchical- all of them collectively dovetailing together into a single conjoined, fully porous and infinitely episodic experience. Obviously Imperial Rome is not the city of today. It is a city of a much longer history, the understanding of which is never simple. Because Rome is also simultaneously the city of the obscure Middle Ages, of the intellectual Renaissance, of the rich Baroque, of rational early modernism and of the erasures of the Fascist era, history presents itself through these episodes. Its continuous change, transformation and evolution have created something distinct from, and yet still connected back to, each of its historical antecedents. What remains (at least within its preserved fabric) is its original sense of spatial interiority applied throughout the episodic interconnectedness of its public realm. As an individual, it is empowering to experience. One such episode might be the passage that ascends the Gianicolo Hill to the Aqua Paola. Beginning at the base of the Spanish Academy where a section of the ancient axial via Arenula crosses the via Garibaldi, there is a small marker situated at the curved corner, an

Axonometric view and Ground Plan of the Imperial Forums

oblong basin fountain easily missed. Traversing the arduous ramp of a hill, one passes on the right, mostly concealed by a garden wall and forever closed to the public, the 18th century baroque grounds of the Arcadian Academy (documented by Letarouilly). On the left is a late 19th century structure that houses the Spanish Liceo Cervantes school that steps steeply up pretending to disregard the slope. This concludes with a monumental stair of three stories framed by a now emergent fragment of the 3rd century Aurelian wall on one side and a retaining wall to the Piazza dell’ Acqua Paola on the other. Scaling the stair, one can see looming the urns atop the gateway that leads to the Parco Garibaldi with its parapet promenade that holds the noonday canon. To pause at the top offers another unexpected and eventually preferred opportunity. Deciding instead to move left one approaches the narrow side elevation of the Aqua Paola, which then quickly unspools into the space before its great fountain façade, and the crashing cascade of its waterfalls. Constructed in 1612 under the patronage of Pope Paul V, its elaborate white marble façade is the result of a dismembered Forum of Domitian. This becomes the stage from which a protagonist’s panoramic gaze can look back out across the entire city of Rome. Engaging this episode, just one of so many, by a conscious and determined choosing, a response to the architectural clues that are still in evidence, the student is no longer just a transient visitor, but has graduated to become one of the city’s actors, now standing before the fountain’s proscenium, rewarded with the knowledge that he/she is actually an integrated player in Rome’s 2750 year history, and even more importantly, in its and his/her own future.

1. Denkmaler der Kunst, Prof W. Lubke and Dr. C.V. (Stuttgart: Lutzow, 4th edition, 1883) 2. The first edition was published in 1896 in a different format. 3. This is somewhat speculative. With the evolution of technology, the quantity of images used for lecture illustration always increased. To my experience the oldest slide projectors were quite cumbersome requiring a single image to be inserted one at a time by an operator. This was substituted with linear tray that could hold about 25 slides. The Kodak rotary carousel could hold 80 images still allowing for the glass slide with a heavier frame. With the advent of thinner paper frames, the rotary carousel increased to hold 140. The idea of pairing projectors allowed for greater elaboration still increasing yet again the quantity of images. 4. Interview with Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Saundra Weddle, Drury University Marc J. Neveu, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, JAE volume 64, Issue 2, March 2011, pages 76-81. 5. William Ellis, Type and Context in Urbanism: Colin Rowe’s Contextualism in Oppositions Reader, ed. Michael K. Hays (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998) 6. James Tice, Revealing the Micro Urbanism of Rome, in Gianbattista Nolli and Rome, edited by Alan Ceen, Ian Verstegen, Studium Urbis, 2013 7. Princeton Press published a facsimile of the folio version starting in 1997. 8. The Death and Life of the Great American City (New York: Random House, 1961) The term sidewalk ballet comes from Jane Jacobs speaking about the pedestrian world of the sidewalk. 9. Subsequent syllabi have typically begun with a speculative analysis phase in which students examine a collection of episodic sequences from within the city, see Episodic Urbanisms, submitted for the 105th ACSA meeting. 10. The Legacy of Roman Urbanism is a course taken as a prerequisite for the Pratt Institute Undergraduate Rome Program. 11. William L. MacDonald, The Architecture of the Roman Empire: Volume II, an Urban Appraisal, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). His volume I, An Introductory Study, is equally interesting as it is not structured as a general survey of Roman Architecture, but instead focuses on a selection of canonical buildings that can tell the story of Roman architectures evolution and accomplishment. 12. see for example Frank Brown’s Roman Architecture, Vincent Scully’s Architecture or Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Meaning in Western Architecture. 13. Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001)

Analysis of the episodic sequence scaling the Gianicolo Hill, Elizabeth Gelpi, Noorah Al Salbah and Adrian Lo

David Leatherbarrow, The Roots of Architectural Invention: Site, Enclosure, Materials

without an author present to imagine a conception of the site, without human memory to imagine commonalities among habitations, and without a built result that a sentient body and mind can experience, architecture has not happened.

COLLECTION

Documentation and Beyond Richard Piccolo, Adjunct Professor and Program Director

For any visitor, but in particular for the student, Rome presents a formidable body of urban knowledge. It becomes immediately clear that getting to know the city will be a different kind of challenge. It is an experience wherein one needs to be fully present in its architecture, so as to move through its spaces with all senses alert and working. No wonder then the historical proliferation of guides, both in print and in person, to offer the clues to the acquisition of that knowledge for a price. Which days and hours institutions are closed or open, which direction to travel in to get to a destination, which architectural moment reveals which period in its long history. The wealth of material that Rome presents crosses over and belies categorization, so often blending and mixing all of its periods, that it is to a certain extent impossible to know where to begin. Free hand drawing offers a way in. It remains an important and essential means to addressing not only the art of seeing, but also and maybe more importantly, the art of memory. For 40 years the Pratt Undergraduate Architecture Program in Rome has emphasized the role of the drawing. In the late 1970s this was self-evident. To quote from several architects When one travels and works with visual things- architecture, painting, or sculptureone uses one’s eyes and draws, so as to fix deep down in one’s experience what is seen. Once the impression has been recorded by the pencil, it stays for good, entered, registered, inscribed. The camera is a tool for idlers, who use a machine to do their seeing for them. To draw for oneself: to trace the lines, handle the volumes, orga-

nize the surface... all this means first to look and then to observe and finally perhaps to discover... and it is then that inspiration may come. Inventing, creating, one’s whole being is drawn into action, and it is this action which counts. Others stood indifferent - but you saw! Le Corbusier I want to see things, I don’t trust anything else. I place things in front of me, on the paper, so I can see them. I want to see, therefore I draw. I can see an image only if I draw. Carlo Scarpa Intentional objects, the authentic phenomena of our experience, are never simply what they are. The discovery of meaningful architectural order should occur in the realm of perception, through the operation of making, of “concrete poetry” or poesis, derived from the challenge of materials and techniques... It is what might be called embodied making, involving a mind in a body, its flesh, its pleasure and its pain, searching for an order rooted in history, perception and materiality. Alberto Perez Gomez Like learning to play an instrument or a foreign language, drawing is a way of stimulating our brains in a new way. The very nature of it is slow and contemplative, it takes time. Such a process gives the student an opportunity to observe, to question, to focus and to order. Moving through these steps, engaging the act of making, allows the student to take possession of what he or she sees and embed it

Palatine Hill ruins, Rome

FACULTY: Richard Piccolo Chris Pelley Frederick Biehle Lawrence Zeroth Anthony Caradonna

COLLECTION

Duomo, Matera Sidong Lang

View of the Sassi, Matera Sidong Lang

into their â&#x20AC;&#x153;design memoryâ&#x20AC;?. Juhani Pallasmaa in the Thinking Hand says: Every act of sketching and drawing produces three different sets of images: the drawing that appears on the paper, the visual image recorded in the cerebral memory, and a muscular memory of the act of drawing itself. Drawing is a process of observation and expression, receiving and giving, at the same time. It is always the result of yet another kind of double perspective; a drawing looks simultaneously outwards and inwards, to the observed or imagined world and into the draughtsmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own persona and mental world. Each sketch and drawing contains a part of the maker and his/her mental world, at the same time that it represents an object or vista in the real world, or in an imagined universe. Every drawing is also an excavation into the drawers past and memory. It is interesting that this program, with its sincere belief in the fundamental value of drawing, and in particular drawing by hand, has passed through the digital revolution as well. Pallasma continues: 22

The problems of the fully computerized design are evident particularly in the most sensitive and vulnerable early phases of the design process when the architectural essence of a building is conceived and determined. My particular suspicion concerns the false precision and apparent finiteness of the computer image as compared with the natural vagueness and innate hesitancy of hand drawing that only through repetition, trial and error, and a gradually achieved assurance and precision, arrives at a satisfactory resolution. To take control of your own design process, it is important to visualize the result. Not the design solution per se, but the scale, ambition and resolution of the final product. A creative insight in architecture is rarely an instantaneous intellectual discovery; neither is it a linear procedure of logical deduction. Most often, it is a process that begins with an initial idea to be developed that branches out onto new paths, generating a pattern of crisscrossing trajectories that grows ever denser throughout the process itself. The act of designing must go back and forth among hundreds of ideas, where partial solutions and details are repeatedly tested against demands and criteria in order to gradually reveal a more complete architectural or artistic entity. An architectural

Duomo and Sassi, Matera

Otranto

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project is not only a result of a problem solving process, it is also a metaphysical proposition that expresses the makerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mental world and his/her understanding of the human world as lived. The design process simultaneously scans the inner and outer worlds and intertwines the two universes. The work of drawing helps to maintain the mental state of uncertainty, hesitation and undecidedness needed in the process for long enough. A sense of certainty, satisfaction and finality that arises too early can be catastrophic. The hesitancy of the drawing itself expresses and maintains my own inner uncertainty. Most importantly, the sense of uncertainty maintains and stimulates curiosity. As long as uncertainty is not permitted to escalate into hopelessness and depression it is a driving force and source of motivation in the creative process. Design is always a search for something unknown in advance, or an exploration into an alien territory, and the design process itself, the actions of the searching hands, need to express the essence of this mental journey. The sometimes arduous task of ordering the marks that the hand makes so that they become intelligible and communicable is itself a design exercise. It leads the student into hundreds of decision 24

making moments relating to comparative dialogues between proportion, scale, and space. The drawing becomes not only a way of documenting an experience but more importantly, a way of discovering oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personal relationship with the world and its history. In this way Rome becomes a part of every student who has chosen to study it through drawing.

Padula, Matera

Brion Family Tombs, Possagno

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Cathedral of S. Francesco, Assisi

Campo Marzio building fabric

Room 305, 405, 304 & 602, Hotel Sassi, Matera Sidong Lang

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Trastevere Streets, Rome Sidong Lang

Trastevere Streets, Rome Jose Cruz

via di S. Francesco al Ripa, Rome Sidong Lang

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Matera Sidong Lang

Colosseum, Rome Aaron Schiickling

Borgo near Piazza S. Pietro, Rome Chad Mattias

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Piazza and Chiesa, S. Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome Sidong Lang Cathedral of Spoleto, Spoleto, Umbria Victor Alenar

Monte Cassino

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Basilica Maxentius, Rome Adrian Lo Campo Marzio, Rome Chad Mattias

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Sassi, Matera (above) Plan of Ancient Paestum Sidong Lang

Villa Giulia, Rome (left) Cut Paper Re-drawings Jessica Kao

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Piazza S. Apollonia, Rome Sidong Lang

Urban Studies, Otranto

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Cathedral di S. Nicola, Trani (left) Urban Study, Otranto Sidong Lang

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Urban Study, Lecce Sidong Lang

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Campo Marzio, Rome Gordon LaPlante

Campo Marzio, Rome Dan Grehl

Campo Marzio, Rome Chad Mattias

Santa Maria in Campitelli Chad Mattias

Urban Study, Stampalia Sidong Lang

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Campo Marzio Sasha Grishina Cavea of the Theater at Pompeii (below)

Campo Marzio, Rome Irene Chin Stephanie Gandelson

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Campo Marzio, Rome Jose Cruz Dan Grehl

Urban Study, Firenze Sidong Lang

Monte Cassino

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Pantheon, Rome Jeffrey Luong

Pantheon, Rome Sidong Lang

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Matera Sidong Lang

Daughters of Danaus from the Villa of the Papyri, Naples National Archeological Museum 52

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Castle of Frederic II, Bari Urban Study, Trastevere, Rome (left) Jessica Kao, Neil Price 53

S. Ivo in Sappienza, Rome Richard Colwell

Campidoglio, Rome Sidong Lang

Firenze Sidong Lang View from Piazzale Caffarelli with the swarming starlings, Rome (below)

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Autografo della Pianta di Roma, Gianbattista Nolli, 1736-44

Reorienting Rome: Space Myth Wilderness Jeffrey Hogrefe, Associate Professor, Humanities and Media Studies; Coordinator, Architecture Writing: Language Making

In 1748, Giambattista Nolli published the Pianta Grande di Roma, an iconographic map of Rome that still bears his name due to its importance. The conceptual innovation of the Nolli Map in defining the urban as a negotiation of the public and private was largely the result of technological innovations in new measurement and survey technology. For architects, the Nolli Map introduced the representational strategy of figure-ground drawing, in which the buildings in the map are depicted in poche, a dark shading that shows their scale and mass as objects on a white ground. Interior spaces such as St. Peters and the Pantheon were also drawn as if they were open public squares in the map. In many ways, the most radical development of the Nolli Map, at least for the purposes of this paper, was that it reoriented the city from east to north—the direct result of the refinement of the technology of the compass, which accurately provided an orientation to magnetic north—true north.1 The map-making enterprise of Nolli encompassed many years of painstaking surveying with physically demanding equipment, which resulted in an accurate plan view of Rome. As a cartographic gesture that altered the cultural perception of a place, at the same time, was the mapping of the Mason-Dixon Line by Jeremiah Mason and Charles Dixon, which eventually divided north from south, slave from free in the United States. The Nolli Map introduced the perception of Rome as a city steeped in antiquity with extensive public space amenable to the tourist-visitor. The northern orientation focused attention on the Vatican to the north of the ancient city. At the time, Rome was emerging as the principal city in the Grand Tour of European Capitals in the romantic imagination of the British, European and American upper class—and for Catholic pilgrims to the Vatican. It was as if the mapping turned attention away from the eastward-oriented ancient city that faced Africa and Asia—eastern and southern outposts of the Roman Empire, from which ancient Rome derived considerable cultural dynamism dur-

ing the period of expansion and trade.2 In fact, “to be oriented,” was to face the East, to face the Other, the outsider, the exotic and uncanny, the horizon as the sun rises in the morning.3 Earlier maps of Rome, such as the Bufalino Map, were oriented to the east and south where the empire once extended to present day Palestine and Syria with close ties to Egypt and Tunisia to the South. The relationship between the map and the territory in the history of mapped representations of Rome is interesting to regard in reflecting on the outcomes of the psychogeographic walking practices that are described in this paper, and the role of cognitive embodiment in the articulation of map and territory relationships. The northern orientation of the Nolli Map that still guides the contemporary episodic walk of Rome is almost naturally reoriented by the actions of the walkers in their psychogeography to the primal water and earth of Rome as it faces the East and the Orient. This is as the place may have appeared to the nomadic wanderer approaching the city on the horizon. This article sets out to reflect on the interventions that resulted from the Rome Program walking practices, and to situate them in relationship to the ways in which the activation of the dialectic between space and place can lead to embodiment of a subject who is locating and recording their own impressions by following procedural, intentional and self-referential walking practices from the historical avant-garde. Due to the constraints adapted by the walkers—to walk into the city without a way-finding device and to follow their instincts so that the walk becomes the event—it was as if tacit knowledge directed the walkers in their practice to an original Rome. Instead of locating the piazzas and churches of the Nolli Map for their investigations and interventions, the participants moved into essential geographical features of the city in relationship to the River Tiber and the horizon as seen from the eastern facing hills of Traste-

An example of the sequential development along the axis of via Condotti in Nolli’s map. Ceen, Allan. “Portrait of a City,” into to Rome 1748: The Pianta Grande di Roma of Giambattista Nolli, ed. J.H. Aronson. Highmount, NY: J.H. Aronson, 1984.

vere—features in the landscape that are generally ancillary to the contemporary tourist experience of Rome. It seemed that the antique landscape that still resides on the ground was activated by the deliberate practice of walking, highlighting the dialectic between space and place that guided the interventions. The results of the walking practices are interesting to regard in relation to the experiments in alternatives to the present by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, which were created contemporaneously with the Nolli Map in response to the map and in fact overlapped with the map-making enterprise in an interesting interlocutory exchange between Nolli and Piranesi. As architects who were exploring the ancient past in an Enlightenment interpretation of the city, Nolli and Piranesi were both inspired by the fragments of theForma Urbis, an ancient map of the plan of Rome in marble that was unearthed by archaeologists in the sixteenth century and was exhibited at the time of their enterprise.4 Piranesi assisted Nolli in the extensive survey of the eighteenth century plan of Rome, a fact which situates the subsequent etchings that he produced of Rome in an interesting comparative context. While Nolli in his map set out to create a scientifically precise, rational plan of Rome, Piranesi in his etchings set out to locate the imaginative in the ruins of the ancient Rome as a place of alternate future-pasts in a labyrinth of endless stairs and receding columns. What’s particularly interesting for this study is Piranesi’s drawings of the Campo Marzio (Field of Mars), a utopian/dystopian future for Rome, which he located in the military parade ground in the southern part of the ancient city and the Carceri, prisons that Piranesi located in his drawings in sequestered places in the South alongside the catacombs. To Nolli’s northern orientation, Piranesi was oriented to the South outside the wall of the ancient city and to the exotic and forbidden pasts of the ancient empire—at a time when

the territory of the past as an archaeological site was being plotted on a rational map. In his etchings, Piranesi introduces a concept of modern space into the place of Enlightenment Rome by capturing, through unlikely juxtapositions of objects in uncommon scales, the sublime collision between the classical and modern exhibitions and the impossibility of architecture to represent anything but itself.5 With Piranesi, the “theme of imagination thus enters into the history of modern architecture with all its ideological significance. The invention, fixed and circulated by means of the etching, renders concrete the role of utopia: to present an alternative that departs from actual historical conditions, one that pretends to be in a metahistorical dimension, but only in order to project into the future the bursting forth of present conditions.”6 For Manfredo Tafuri, Piranesi is an architectural provocateur who sets out to challenge the role of rulebased formal architecture as a mimetic device of the classical past by proposing a critical and speculative architecture that focuses on the dispossessed and marginal areas of Rome in the cracks of the Forma Urbis. What particularly interests this study in embodied cognition is the way in which, in his drawings, Piranesi presents the scale of the space in a series of arresting images that anticipate the role of cinematic montage as it was introduced by the filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, who writes that the Piranesian path creates: “…constant interruption and images of leaping…a deepening perspective…interrupted by a bridge, a column, an arch, a passage…a motif taken in reduced perspective, approximately twice as large as the eye would suggest.”7 In the context of this essay, the concepts “space and place,” are informed by Michel De Certeau’s obvious yet productive maxim: “… Space is a practiced place.” Space and place in De Certeau’s theory, are given meaning by the practices employed in them by the sub-

The Putto appears in the margin of the 1551 Bufalini map; leaning over a drafting table to portray the drafting process. Ceen, Allan. “Portrait of a City,” into to Rome 1748: The Pianta Grande di Roma of Giambattista Nolli, ed. J.H. Aronson. Highmount, NY: J.H. Aronson, 1984.

Piranesi, Diverse Ways of ornamenting chimneypieces and all other parts of houses taken from Egyptian, Etruscan, and Grecian architecture with an Apologia in defense of the Egyptian and Tuscan architecture (1769), etching. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Trans: Barbara Luigi La Penta. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1976.

ject who is determined for the most part by the exchange between the strategy of place and tactics of space. In many ways, Piranesi’s subject in the concept of modern space is the author himself in the endless labyrinth of the ancient Roman Empire as seen from an imagined future looking back to the past toward a possibility of a utopian/dystopian Rome. “The past, present and future, the spatially and socially impossible, and that which is eliminated from space and excluded from society and culture are all synthesized in Piranesi’s spaces, which were themselves unthinkable at the time of their production, space that present the city as both myth and object, ruinous spaces, heterotopia.”8 De Certeau advances the theory that the strategy of place can generate a space through the tactic of collective action, which then circulates back to inform the place, so that the dialectics of space and place work in symbiosis to excite the production of space and place.

Piranesi, Campo Marzio (1762) etching. Campus Martius // Opere di Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Francesco Piranesi e d’altri. Firmin Didot Freres, Paris, 1835-1839. Tomo 10. Piranesi, Carceri d’invenzione (1760), etching. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Trans: Barbara Luigi La Penta. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1976.

Like the space of Piranesi’s Rome, the walking practices excavated the landscape to reveal essential elements, cardinal orientations and mythological ground. De Certeau simply defines the ways in which the perceptive operation of the body in a walking practice can generate spatial knowledge: “…the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.”9 Upending cartographic certainty with poetics of landscape, the walks that were conducted in Rome resulted in what De Certeau refers to as operations of making out boundaries, “which consist of narrative contracts and compilations of stories, and are composed of fragments drawn from earlier stories and fitted together in makeshift fashion (briocoles).” To De Certeau, the narrative contracts and compilations of stories “shed light on the formation of myths, since they also have the function of founding and articulating spaces.”10 As if referring to the walking practices in relation to the fragments of the Forma Urbis that

Piranesi, evolution maps from Campo Marzio (1762), etching. Agrest, Diana I. “Piranesi and The Modern Urban Discourse.” The Imagined and Real Landscapes of Piranesi: Critical Writings in America. Edited by Joseph Rosa. Columbia Books of Architecture, Catalogue 4. Columbia University, 1992, 8.

inspired Piranesi in his drawings, he writes: “What a map cuts up, the story cuts across […] it establishes an itinerary (it “guides”) and it passes through (it “transgresses”) […] it is topological, concerning the deformation of figures, rather than topical, defining places.” Constraints from a genealogy of walking practices that are presented in Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, by the Roman architect Francesco Careri, situate the historical avant-garde in contemporary practices. The walking practice took place on three sequential days at the onset of the program. The action of passing through space, “as an aesthetic form,”11 began to reveal what Careri refers to as nomadism, which has always existed “in osmosis with settlement.”12 Rome contains nomadic spaces and sedentary spaces that exist side by side in a delicate balance of voids and solids. That the walking practice can reveal the origins of the city as a place of transhistorical nomadism was appealing to consider as cuts were made into Nolli and Piranesi’s Rome of antiquity and the Enlightenment—especially with regard to the nomadic spaces that have informed the Campo Marzio and Carceri, the heterotopic spaces of the outsider found in both the military grounds and prison. “In this sense we must make a journey back to the roots of the relationship between path and architecture…in an age when architecture did not exist as the physical construction of space, but as a symbolic construction—inside the path—of the territory.”13 The walking practice is an aesthetic act of a transhistorical person that for an urban walker can reveal “transurbanences,” which exist inside the “wrinkles of the city where spaces in transit have grown, revealing territories in continuous transformation in time.”14 The historical avant-garde walking practice is a radical act that reveals the essence of a place through alterations in the way that a place can be experienced in a space and place continuum. The body senses and alters the way the mind perceives, which in turn

creates informal knowledge that leads to new ways of seeing and being. An archive of fleeting and affective Rome experiences and a genealogy of informal knowledge production was accumulated and disseminated among the walkers. Although the students were introduced to the Nolli Map and the etchings of Piranesi before they arrived in Rome, the walking practices took place on their first day in Rome before they had time to develop a sense of the actual place. For most, Rome was a blank tablet. In Trastevere, where the studios are located, they divided into self-selecting groups. Each of the respective groups set out on a walk in a direction that they found on their own by following their instincts, and in so doing located a discrete path that corresponded with the collective conscience of the group. The findings of this affective or sense-mapping, was later considered taken together as a series of interlocking paths that radiated out from the origin of the walks, in and around the city to create a psychogeography of Rome. The oxymoron of the term “historical avant-garde” to refer to a small group of artists and writers in the last century who were seeking to revolutionize the way that art and architecture is generated and experienced, and the role of Piranesi in the avant-garde, would be suitable for a longer study that is devoted solely to that topic.15 What’s important to note here is that the historically situated movements—Dada, Surrealist and Situationists--were generated in the middle of the last century in response to the alienation of the fragmented modern subject in the production, contingency and agency of art and literature, as was true two hundred years earlier for Piranesi. Critical practices from the historical avantgarde entered academic architectural theory and practice in the late twentieth century as a provocation to formal propositions that were increasingly engaged in technology that was challenging to the experience of the body, and the desire for a more fluid architectural language. Not only did this approach to architecture seem

A comparison of Nolli’s Nouva Pianta di Roma (1748) which orients Rome to the north and Nolli’s reproduction of Bufalini’s map of Rome (1551) which orients Rome to the east. Ceen, Allan. “Portrait of a City,” into to Rome 1748: The Pianta Grande di Roma of Giambattista Nolli, ed. J.H. Aronson. Highmount, NY: J.H. Aronson, 1984.

to be important for the architecture students who were experiencing Rome together for the first time; It seemed to be important for their relationship to a city with a complicated past, and the role of a shared archive in the formation of community. The space of Rome that emerged as a result of the student’s walking practices was a sensorial space of nomadic paths that bisected the map of Rome as laid out by Nolli, and found curious intersections with the phantasmagorical drawings of Piranesi in the modern subjectivity of Rome. Although the students’ walking practices were informed by Piranesi’s drawings of the monuments of Rome as labyrinthal, self-referential future-pasts, the practices also grounded the students in a real place of Rome, which kept emerging in our discussions. Whereas Piranesi sets his drawings against the Rome of “the real and unreal, the remembered known and the imagined unknown,”16 the maps that the students created of Rome kept referring back to the place of Rome. The goal was to see what would arise from a dedication to the inner rhythms of a body as it passes in, through and around a place for fleeting engagements. Deliberately set out to disturb the settled presence of Rome by focusing on that which is not normally seen through a dedication of all of the senses on the scale of the human body taking one step at a time—collecting, measuring and sifting through the text of the city. The Pyramid of Gaius Cestius, a small-scale Egyptian-style pyramid, which was built in 12 BC as a tomb for the principal leader of the collegial group known as Septemvire Epulonum, was later incorporated into the section of the Aurelian Walls that borders the Cimitero Acattolico, or Protestant Cemetery. The only pyramid in Rome and the central figure in one of Piranesi’s drawings of Rome, “The Pyramid of Cestius,” is exaggerated in the etching to emerge as a towering presence in a city struggling with the force of nature

that was consuming the Eighteenth-century city as it entered into a decadent period as a tourist destination. The students treated the pyramid as a Dada Readymade, which is to say as a complete aesthetic experience in relationship to the approaches to the graves of the English Romantic poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who are buried in the cemetery. The pyramid originally stood outside the walled city at the crossroads of two ancient Roman roads that led south and east to the Tiber. What’s inside and outside of the wall—the student’s intervention, at least—considered that question as they placed a red blanket in front of the graves of the Romantic poets and observed the ways in which the space was altered fleetingly by their intervention. The tourists to the site had to walk around the blanket to consider the color red as a signifier of death and the memory of the past as it was performed in the present. Central to the students’ performance was the romantic deaths of Keats and Shelley, who died within a few years of each other when they were not much older than the students, occasions that were marked by the elements of water, fire and air. Keats died in Rome of tuberculosis at the age of 25. “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” is the epitaph on his gravestone; a verse recited in unison by the students in their performance. Shelley died of drowning and was cremated on the beach where his body was found. The story is that his heart was snatched from his body during the cremation and presented to his wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. The story also goes that Shelley’s heart was later cast in silver and buried in the grave of his son, Percy, wrapped in Adonais, his elegy for Keats. Echoing the drawing of the pyramid of Cestius by Piranesi, the reader of Adonais is urged to: Go thou to Rome - at once the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness;

And where its wrecks like shatter’d mountains rise And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress The bones of Desolation’s nakedness Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;17 The concept of Rome as a place where events have occurred and transformed into a space where the continuous past, present and future is still being enacted in real time was reinforced by another group of walkers which rediscovered the mythological origins of Rome on the actual banks of the River Tiber. This site was located by way of an approach that permitted them to climb down to the riverbank, which for Romans is still a neglected territory out of deference perhaps to the spirits of the countless miscreants and political enemies who were thrown in the river as corpses over the past two thousand years. The riverbank was reconstructed in the studio with rocks and flotsam that were brought back to create a non-site, a practice of the Earth Artists such as Robert Smithson which sought to reimagine the physicality of landscape as it can be removed and rearranged in another setting. The landscape of Rome as a non-site was considered together with a recitation of the rich mythology of the role of the river in the familiar myth of the founding of Rome by the twin brothers Romulus and Remus—abandoned in the river in a box, rescued and suckled by the wolf Lupa and fed by a woodpecker who brought food to the twins in its bill.19 The box, the river, the wolf, the woodpecker and the crying were gathered together in a bricolaged performance of material practices of the non-site of Rome and its pre-human origins. The space of fragments of stories that were gathered together as a record of the mythology of Rome, —this was returned to the place

A psychogeographic map based on a walk through Rome. From Vol. 1. Plate 4 of Parinaesi’s Le Antichita Romanes (Rome 1756) illustrating Nolli’s arrangement of the fragments of the Forma Urbis. Ceen, Allan. “Portrait of a City,” into to Rome 1748: The Pianta Grande di Roma of Giambattista Nolli, ed. J.H. Aronson. Highmount, NY: J.H. Aronson, 1984.

of Rome by yet another group of walkers that moved west into the hills of Trastevere, which opened to reveal the horizon of Rome from where the city could be viewed in perspective oriented to the East. The place of Rome was reconsidered as we viewed the horizon from the hills that look out to the ancient city across the Tiber. Edward Casey emphasizes the role of the horizon in the location of a place as distinct from other places, as we found by considering an eastward facing Rome that our walks had revealed in the Trastevere hills, which opened to the encompassing horizon. Confirming what was found on the horizon of Rome, Casey presents the theory that movement in a perceptual field is to be encompassed by edges that are neither spatial nor temporal. These edges seem to point to the nomadic voids that were discovered in the walks. Rome consists largely of a tight maze of ancient and medieval pathways, punctuated by Renaissance piazzas, which tend to obscure the view of the horizon. Casey, moreover, points out that we cannot map a horizon even if we can draw it. The nature of the horizon is to open out even as it encloses. “Rather than being the minion of an absolute space and time—place is in charge of their shared matrix.”20 So it is with the place of Rome from the stairs of the eastern facing hills where what remains as a record of the walking practice is a video of the two walkers running on the stairs as they become shadows, dramatizing the challenging impossibility of the text of Rome. As Eisenstein writes of the double nature of Piranesi as both subject and object of his own exploration of the space of Rome: “And it is not accidental that the mutual memory of the two poets—one about the etchings and the other the story about them—embodied this idea into a real image of the author of the etchings running along the staircases.”21 The Piranesian Rome is a sublime experience of the magnitude of the colonial enterprise of ancient Rome in a city that was reoriented to the North at the same time as the gaze of the British and

Pyramid of Caius Cestuis No. 57, State: I, 1761. The Imagined and Real Landscapes of Piranesi: Critical Writings in America. Edited by Joseph Rosa. Columbia Books of Architecture, Catalogue 4. Columbia University, 1992, 43.

European was reoriented to the Western Hemisphere, where the improvements in the technology of the survey also mapped the New World in Cartesian grids. The ancient Roman Empire deterritorialized from the South and East and reterritorialized in the North and West. Ancient Rome is still a palpable presence in the Western Hemisphere, which is one of the factors that makes Rome semesters popular for students of architecture. Naively prescient, the historical avant-garde walking practices documented in this paper seem to have located a Rome that existed before the ancient exhibition in the mythological that was visible on the horizon to the nomadic wanderer. Perhaps a new mythology of Rome will emerge in the postcolonial exhibition as a response to the relationship between Piranesiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heterotopic spaces and the reorientation to the South and East that took place in these walking practices, and a return to the influence of the African and Asian of the eastern oriented city. Doubtless, the walking practices are useful as a means of recognizing a psychogeography in the chaos of the peripheries at the edge of the horizon where the nomadic voids are located and as a means through which to invent new ways to intervene as myth, object and record of space and place.

Images taken from a video by Eric Moed and Jack Rutka illustrating Rome walking practices.

1. Ceen, Allan. “Portrait of a City,” into to Rome 1748: The Pianta Grande di Roma of Giambattista Nolli, ed. J.H. Aronson. Highmount, NY: J.H. Aronson, 1984 “There has never been a more exact, complete plan of the contemporary city before or since Nolli’s masterpiece. It belongs to a series of important ichnographic (ie, plan-map as opposed to view map) images of the city that start with the early third-century Forma Urbis and end with another Forma Urbis by Lanciani published between 1893 and 1901.) , TK. 2. Perowne, Stewart. Roman Mythology. London: Paul Hamlyn, 1969. “[In ancient Rome], the word ‘oriental’ had acquired something of the pejorative sense that attached to the word Levantine in our own age; but, it is essential to remember that…the east was far more fertile in ideas, in the arts, in philosophy, in learning and in religion than the west. The extent of the intellectual vacuum of the west can be gauged from one very simple fact, that in the great land mass now occupied by Spain, Portugal and France, the Latin language at once supplanted the local dialects. In the east, Latin never supplanted the vernacular Aramaic or Egyptian, still less the Greek which since the days of Alexander had been the international language…The east gave Rome far more than Rome gave the east.” 84. 3. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.” Cited in Ahmed, Sarah. “The Orient and Others.” Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, 4. Ceen, Allan. “Portrait of a City,” into to Rome 1748: The Pianta Grande di Roma of Giambattista Nolli, ed. J.H. Aronson., 1984, TK 5. Blummer, Jennifer. “Il Campo Marzio: “La region ou s’erige le desir sans contrainte.”The Imagined and Real Landscapes of Piranesi: Critical Writings in America. Editor: Joseph Rosa. New York: Columbia Books of Architecture, Catalogue 4, 1992, 20. 6. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Trans: Barbara Luigi La Penta. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1976, 29. 7. Eisenstein, Segei. “Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms.” In Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Trans: Barbara Luigi La Penta. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1976, 84-85. 8. Agrest, Diana I. “Piranesi and The Modern Urban Discourse.” The Imagined and Real Landscapes of Piranesi: Critical Writings in America. Editor: Joseph Rosa. New York: Columbia Books of Architecture, Catalogue 4, 1992, 7. 9. De Certeau, Michel. “Spatial Stories.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans: Steven Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984, p, 117.

10. De Certeau, “Spatial Stories,” 1984, 122-123. 11. Careri, “Anti-Walk.” 2002,70. 12 Careri,“Anti-Walk.” 2002, 63. 13. Careri,“Anti-Walk.” 2002, 64. 14. Careri, Franceso. “Anti-Walk,” in Land+Scape Series: Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, SA, 2002, 63. 15. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Trans: Barbara Luigi La Penta. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1976. 16. Blummer, Jennifer. “Il Campo Marzio: “La region ou s’erige le desir sans contrainte.”The Imagined and Real Landscapes of Piranesi: Critical Writings in America. Editor: Joseph Rosa. New York: Columbia Books of Architecture, Catalogue 4, 1992, 19. 17. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats. XLIX http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174379 18. Smithson, Robert. Selected Writings by Robert Smithson. www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm 19. Stapleton, Michael. The Illustrated Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1986. 20. Casey, Edward. Getting Back into Place Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009, 345. 21. Eisenstein, Sergei M. “Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms.” In Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinthe: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Trans: Pellegrino d’Cierno and Robert Connolly. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987, 83.

Adam Gopnik, Last of the Metrozoids

not a religious kind of faith. a faith only in possibility, a faith not that we will know something finally, but a faith in not knowing, a faith in our ignor ance, a faith in our being confounded and dumbfounded, as something fertile with possible meaning and growth.

SPECULATION

Precedent Studies and Speculative Considerations

Rome is perhaps the most remarkable “library” of spatial experience in the world. The encounter with this city, foreign yet familiar, profound and contradictory, will inevitably question any students’ design priorities. The studio work of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture in Rome has made a consistent effort to learn from the physical and perceptual discoveries of this city and to engage the figural essence of Rome’s residual space, its exterior interiority. This is the labyrinth into which each student must inevitably step in order to lose their way. All that which has been familiar will soon be lost. To find a way out one must proceed with constant attentive curiosity. It requires a different understanding as to place and orientation, reliant on coming to know the unique relationship between an incremental part and a larger, not quite comprehensible whole. It is a knowledge constructed cumulatively, but with it, each student can begin to build a bridge back to what they already know. The pedagogy of the studio is divided into two parts: PRECEDENT and PROPOSAL. The precedent investigation begins with an examination of the historical city’s density in connection with physical porosity. The resultant residual continuity is identified as a critical value, one that empowers the individual by the reoccurrence of choice in the determination of ones movement. The students are asked to analyze distinctly sectional/spatial artifacts that can be understood to thematically underlie larger and more varied urban narratives. Whether identifiable as a singular monumental element (Castel S. Angelo, Vittoriano, Campidoglio, Trajan’s Market) or an assemblage of spaces that includes a recognizable public space (Aqua Paola, Piazza S. Pietro in Montorio, Piazza Quirinale), they are all, in fact, characterized by an episodic sequence of sectionally interconnected spaces. These studies become the basis for both an extrapolated game of transformation and re-assembly as well as the speculative point of

departure for an architectural intervention to be located at the very center of the historic city. The physical/spatial artifacts are investigated first hand, measured and documented according to more conventional analytical considerations- in plan, section and unfolded section. With the analytical document in hand, the student is asked to disassemble it into its component parts and then to reinvent it: to devise a series of strategies that will change the relationship of parts to whole. The artifact becomes a tool not unlike a swiss army knife combined with a folding ruler. Each device of the knife (space) is unique relative to its prescribed function, but connected to the next at a hinge point. As such, it can be unfolded and configured in a nearly unlimited number of ways to address whatever tasks/problems may be confronted. Given the de-contextualizing of the object and the absence of any new requirement for performance, the requested transformation is to be understood as research into the matrix of possibility, an exercise to understand first- the categories of transformation, and then- their representation through example. The emphasis on taxonomy requires the use of a comparative method for critical evaluation. Certain configurations are selected as better illustrating the stated formal characteristics. These selections are then modeled in three dimensions as “solids”. The “casting” of the spaces is the catalyst for one final transformation/reconsideration of the original precedent: that of scale- first, recognizing the potential of the exterior-interiority of the city’s residual space to act as actual interior and secondly, to more tangibly grasp the relationship between city-building-room.

Frederick Biehle, coordinator

FACULTY: Erika Hinrichs Lawrence Zeroth Anthony Caradonna Francesco Mancini Laura Abrahams Frederick Biehle

Refiguring Urban Morphologies Various Students

TRANSFORMATION

Reconstructed view of Trajanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Forum with the irregular skyline of the market beyond

Trajanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Market is perhaps a unique architectural proposition for any age. Its scale is generous, its rise steep, its levels numerous, and its plan complex, and so it is able to support more than one sequential itinerary. Conceived of as pure infill, its form was determined by three highly differentiated sides. Configured internally to provide a monumental space, it also carries through the pattern of the surrounding streets. Its most distinguishing external form, (which presents its recognizable face today) is the hemicycle. And yet this monumental curvature was not used to control or balance the overall plan. The building is made up of over 150 small rooms or shops shaped to the irregularities of the site and the necessity of the public program. The result- conceptually, functionally, and visually was an urban neighborhood in a single building, a city within the city- with its own irregular skyline, curving streets, and changing vistas. As a place, the market was so large, and its plan so complexly diverse, that it would never have been comprehensible as a single entity. It was and is a place that is emblematic of the ideal of urban continuity.

MERCA

ATO DI TRAIANO

Aimee Keefer

Kate Moxham Aimee Keefer

DOCUMENTATION

Kate Moxham

DOCUMENTATION

Elizabeth Demello Gordon LaPlante

TRANSFORMATION

Bryan Kim Lydia Kieborth

TRANSFORMATION

Elizabeth Demello Gordon LaPlante

TRANSFORMATION

E. Vaudremer, Mausoleo di Adriano, Sezione, 1838

One begins on the far, “preferred” side of the Tiber River, facing up at the distant St. Michael the archangel, sword raised in the motion of its sheathing, standing amidst the remains of a now somewhat obscured trident of Renaissance urban invention. What follows is entirely scripted. The walk over the ancient Ponte S. Angelo, the bridge of Bernini’s angels, directly on axis with the Castle/Tomb to its vaulted entrance. Passing through the small portal and descending so as to achieve the level ground of antiquity. From here one circumnavigates the interior of the Hadrianic drum along a continuously vaulted interior, punctured by intermittent shaftways in floor and ceiling. After a full rotation the passageway is bisected by an axial ramp crossing diagonally through its diameter, with a draw bridge at the center. In order to finally breach the ancient cyclopean tomb, one must detour back by way of a L-shaped stairway, to arrive within a protected open courtyard, a new lofted ground set for the Renaissance superimpositions to come. The Castel’s experiential path is an extended secctional passage through the vertical layering of the city’s history.

TOMBA CAST

A ADRIANO/ TEL SAN ANGELO

Stanley Cutsovsky

DOCUMENTATION

Elise Renwick Zack Joslow

Elise Renwick

DOCUMENTATION

Elise Renwick

Elise Renwick Lauren Puccarelli

TRANSFORMATION

Stanley Cutsovskly

TRANSFORMATION

Tara Rodriguez

TRANSFORMATION

Elise Renwick

TRANSFORMATION

Andreas Ignatou

TRANSFORMATION

Giuseppi Sacconi, Prospetto Laterale del Monumento, 1888

Sometimes called the last Roman monument the Vittoriano was for many years closed to the public, and thus little more than an enormous commemorative obstacle. With its reopening, both inside and outside, it once again offers a new lesson in urban manners. While clearly succeeding in its attempt to stand out and above - its height dominates from a great distance from any location, its terminal location at the end of the axis from the Porta del Popolo announces the cities central destination. But it also presents two primary urban itineraries. The first scales the monument by choosing a direction from the symmetry of options and passing between steps and landings, scaling (like Trajanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Column) the vertical dimension of the removed Quirinale spur. Upon succeeding to the upper plateau the path leads around to the rear where it connects+ to both the upper landing of the scala S. Maria in Aracoelli, and a rear terrace over the Museo Risorgimento. It then links back around to the Campidoglio in unexpected camaraderie. The inside is of course its own remarkable sequence of 19th century excess.

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MONUM VITTO

MENTO AL ORIO EMANUELE II

Maria Salazaar

Kathy Adee Natalie Kasper

Roger Reichard Naciem Nowrouzi

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Giselle Oh

DOCUMENTATION

Roger Reichard Naciem Nowrouzi

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Kathy Adee

Giselle Oh

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Kathy Adee

DOCUMENTATION

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Maria Salazaar

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TRANSFORMATION

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Vicky Chen Sidong Lang Kendrick Lam

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TRANSFORMATION

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Caroline Pos Giselle Oh Vicky Chen

TRANSFORMATION

G.B.Falda, Altra Veduta del Campidoglio, 1665

The Campidoglio is one of Romeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most recognizable and enduring monuments, but the analysis asks for a more contextual understanding of its urban fit, including with it the approach and church of S. Maria in Aracoeli and the triangulated garden between. Facing the hill from the open piazza at its foot there are four means of ascent. Three of these converge in Michelangelos piazza; the roadway for horses, carriages and automobiles, the extended Cordonata, which Charles V would have scaled on horseback for his ceremonial and triumphant arrival (for which it was originally intended had it been completed), and the winding garden path beside it which passes by the smaller than life bronze figure of Cola de Rienzo whose gate is often locked. The fourth ascent is the Scala S. Maria in Aracoelli which leads to the Basilica from whose interior a side entrance leads out and back again to the principle piazza. This is the abitato side of the hill, and the disabitato side is equally complex offering five additional descents into the Forums Republican and Imperial.

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PIAZZA S. MAR

A ARACOELLI/ RIA IN ARACEOLLI/ CAMPIDOGLIO

Joachin Fernandez Stearns

Derik Lee

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DOCUMENTATION

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Joachin Fernandez-Stearns

7 8

4 1 2 3 individuation of principal facades/spaces

2006

itinerary Piazza del Campidoglio

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individuation of principal facades/spaces

2006

Prof. Frederick Biehle PRATT INSTITUTE

itinerary Piazza del Campidoglio

2006

SPARC

individuation of principal facades/spaces

SP Prof. Frederick Biehle Prof. Frederick Biehle PRATT INSTITUTE PRATT INSTITUTE

itinerary Piazza del Campidoglio

5 5

6 6

7 7

8 8

1 5

7 8

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earns dez-stearns

DOCUMENTATION

itinerary Piazza itinerary del Piazza Campidoglio itinerary Piazza del Campidoglio delPiazza Campidoglio del Campidoglio bly sparts of itinerary parts itinerary itinerary Piazza itinerary del Piazza Campidoglio itinerary Piazza del Campidoglio delPiazza Campidoglio del Campidoglio Joachin Fernandez-Stearns

N ON

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TION

TION TION

TION

joaquinfernandez-stearns

TRANSFORMATION

TION

ARCH 400 119

Residual Spaces - Enclosed models

itinerary Piazza del Campidoglio

Joachin Fernandez-Stearns

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dez-stearns

TRANSFORMATION

rnandez-stearns

Prof. Frederick Biehle PRATT INSTITUTE

SP 2006

itinerary Piazza del Campid

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Joachin Fernandez-Stearns

TRANSFORMATION

Anonymous, View of St. Peters from the Janiculum, 18th c

The Fontana dell’ Acqua Paola is a most prominent monument, both up close and from a greater distance, which are the only two ways it can really be viewed. From the center of the Ponte Sisto it is framed, day or night, as part of a pairing, together with the Fontanone di Ponte Sisto, essentially the beginning and endpoints of Pope Paul V’s reopened aqueduct of Trajan bringing the lake waters of Bracciano. Within the neighborhood of Trastevere, the fountain disappears from view completely. This itinerary begins at the base of the Spanish Academy where a reemergent section of the axial via Arenula crosses the via Garibaldi. There is a small clue, an oblong basin fountain, easily missed, situated at the curved corner. Up the long arduous hill one passes on the right, mostly concealed by a garden wall, the baroque grounds of the Arcadian Academy, and on the left a Spanish children’s school that steps up the hill pretending to disregard the steep slope. This concludes with a monumental stair of three stories framed by a now emergent fragment of the Aurelian wall on one side and a retaining wall to the Piazza dell’ Acqua Paola on the other. Scaling the stair, one can see looming the urns atop the gateway that leads to the Parco Garibaldi with its parapet promenade overlooking the Campo Marzio. But to pause at the top offers yet another, even preferred, if surprising opportunity. Turning left, one approaches first its narrow side elevation, but then, quickly rotates into the space before the great fountain façade, and the crashing cascade of its waterfalls. Its Imperial white marble façade, the result of a dismembered Forum of Domitian, suggests an eternal gaze that looks back across the entire city of Rome.

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VIA DI P PA

PORTA/ PANCRAZIO/ AQUA PAOLA

Detail of Fontana dellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Acqua Paola (left) Adrian Lo

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DOCUMENTATION

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Elizabeth Gelpi Norah Al-Sabah

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Elizabeth Gelpi Norah Al-Sabah

DOCUMENTATION

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Ashley Murphy

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Ashley Murphy

DOCUMENTATION

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Elizabeth Gelpi

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TRANSFORMATION

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Ashley Murphy

134

TRANSFORMATION

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Paul Langley

TRANSFORMATION

Paul Letarouilly, Les Edifices de Rome Moderne, 1840-57, Entrance to the Convent of Pietro in Montorio

The façade of the church of S. Pietro in Montorio, sitting roughly parallel with the central church of S. Maria in Trastevere, is only visible at distinct moments from the Medieval street pattern below. Its travertine surface and prominent circular rose window is, however, immediately recognizable when the labyrinth takes a turn and the view to the top of the Gianicolo opens up. Situated along a dogs leg corner in Trastevere’s remote fabric there is a honed travertine stair, pointing skyward toward the adjacent Spanish Academy, with its single, enormous, always empty, always watching window. A quick skip across the via Garibaldi with a brief pause for traffic takes one to another stair, this one shallower and of brick, a kind of horse ramp that leads solemnly past the stations of the cross. It switches back at what might be a small rock hewn chapel gradually rising to a height above the plateau of the city’s most ubiquitous tiber-side level, and thus gaining a panorama across the rooftops to the finger hills of the west and even the Apennine mountains in the distance. At the crest one finds the triangulated Piazza S. Pietro in Montorio before the church facing down the Aventine hill. Bramante’s Tempietto remains secreted within its shaded courtyard.

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Alex Gryger

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Richard Colwell Carrie McNeely

DOCUMENTATION

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Richard Colwell Chelsea Lipham

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Richard Colwell Jean Choi Carrie McNelly

DOCUMENTATION

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Carrie Mcnelly Paul Stein Steve Marchetta

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TRANSFORMATION

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Alex Gryger

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Steve Marchetta

DOCUMENTATION - TRANSFORMATION

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Carrie Mcnelly Steve Marchetta

TRANSFORMATION

G.B.Piranesi, Veduta della Piazza di Monte Cavallo, 1748-1760

The Piazza Quirinale is an elevated open piazza defined by and concluding three primary urban sequences. The first is the approach to the hills plateau from the area of the Fontana di Trevi which, at its base, divides between two options, the wide stair that continues directly alongside the palace or the ramp that encircles the piazzaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s plaza and connects up with the second sequence, the axial road ascending from the central forum area. The third is the axial street of via del Quirinale, that runs in a straight line to the Porta Pia, following along the â&#x20AC;&#x153;manca lungoâ&#x20AC;? of the palace on one side while passing by the baroque churches of S. Andrea al Quirinale and S. Carlino al Quatre Fontane on the other. The piazza is shaped by ornamented palace architecture on two sides, the royal stables on the third and the open balustrade view to the north on its fourth. An antique obelisk stands grouped with the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux which were discovered nearby in the ruins of the Baths of Constantine, and a large antique fountain basin from Roman Forum, altogether forming a counterpoint to the Quirinale Palace entrance, the focus of the daily ceremonial changing of the guard. As such the space is a figure like a weighted tool, an ax with several points of connection.

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PIAZZA

A QUIRINALE/VIA DEL QUIRINALE

Sherry Aliberti Michael Caton

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Gillian Sollenberger Karl Holman

DOCUMENTATION

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Karl Holman Gillian Sollenberge

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DOCUMENTATION

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James Baalduf Karl Holman Michael Caton

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TRANSFORMATION

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Karl Hollman

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Gillian Sollenberger

DOCUMENTATION - TRANSFORMATION

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Sherry Aliberti

160

TRANSFORMATION

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Giovanni Rabusin

TRANSFORMATION

Campo Marzio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1762

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Vedere e Farsi Vedere; Rome and the Education of the Architect Ryszard Sliwka, Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture

Does Rome still have any place in the education of the modern architect? Le Corbusier’s claim, that to send students to Rome “threatened to cripple them for life,” effectively turned the historical mindset of architecture in the 1920’s on its head. Yet the enchantment the city once provided as part of the Grand Tour has enjoyed a certain renaissance in the last forty years. Postmodern critiques of the failings of modernism and a renewed interest in the architecture of the traditional city have pushed Rome back into the mainstream of contemporary discourse. Even the contrarian challenge of de-constructivism merely uncovered yet another way of reading of the city. Architects such as Peter Eisenman insist that we now operate in a post-humanist world-view, where our sense of values have been displaced from traditional co-ordinates, bringing a dimension of doubt and even disenchantment to the architect’s existential methodology. Yet Eisenman’s emphasis on destabilizing form in order to position architecture in an uncanny interstitial territory somewhere between figure and ground, points to a curious characteristic of the city fabric. Rome’s enchantment instead becomes overlaid with a disquieting narrative to be revealed in the city’s historical fragments and layered spatial complexity. What we see in this lesson of the city’s fabric is a capacity to embrace the contradictions and oppositions that shape human existence. Is Eisenman’s post-humanism right- has Rome, like the discipline of architecture itself, been rendered irrelevant by a constantly accelerating and interconnected world? Or, instead, could we imagine doubt and enchantment as the new paradoxical co-ordinates for the education of the architect? A satellite view of Western Europe at night illuminates a discontinuous corridor of urbanization of around 111 million people. Its tip

starts from Manchester and Birmingham in northern England and stretches in a broadening arc through Holland and Germany, ending in Italy’s industrial north around Milan and Turin. The name given by geographers to this network of relationships and agglomeration of older historic centers, sprawling peripheries and stretches of open space, is the ‘Blue Banana.’ The recognition of this enormous swath of urbanization that transgresses all political boundaries, explains in part the feverish effort to engage with expanded fields of networks that reflect the reality of globalization. As a mindset it can consciously or unconsciously trivialize the nature of the architectural object itself. The constellation of Rome appears peripheral in such a night sky; a historical sideshow shaped by politics, media, tourism and religion rather than the requirements of industry, commerce and communication. Like its many global counterparts, the mental image of a megalopolis such as the ‘Blue Banana’ reflects the hidden dynamic of its underlying network of interconnections. The architectural object is no longer governed by the concerns of the traditional city such as Rome but finds itself in the precarious situation of dealing with the infrastructure of a generic landscape. Furthermore, in an analogous media-saturated virtual landscape, a younger generation of designers can impinge on form, drawing on vast data-scapes of research and digital programs, to twist, warp and fold matrices and vectors on the computer screen in a way considered unimaginable 20 years ago. What emerges more often than not as a result of these kinds of encounters with the reality of the “non- place,” is not invention but an “isolated stupor of the object,” confirming not engagement but “the absence of a felicitous relationship with territory, with nature, and with life.”1 A re-examination of Rome suggests that the city remains irreducible to this kind of reading- and that what the city has to teach us is perhaps more important than ever before.

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Roman Pedagogy The question as to how one educates the hand and eye, thus heightening the intuitions of a designer, is an interesting one. Frederick Biehle in his essay ‘The Actual and its Double,’ touches on an existential agenda as he reflects on the way that spatial, material and tectonic strategies are to be skillfully synthesized: “Stripped of literary fancy, the historical imagination, the casuistry of conscience and the calculations of science, it is the body and human function that are the qualifiers with which the tangents of architectural form making must eventually identify.”2 Biehle ponders on the means by which we might take the experience of our bodies and transcribe ourselves into our architecture, through a personal vocabulary of representational conventions. Drawing and careful observation becomes a ground for the systematic co-ordination of hand and eye. While the pedagogy behind the proposition may have not changed drastically since the days of the ateliers des beaux-arts, taking the time to stop, observe and comprehend in our current accelerated culture appears quite radical. Biehle locates himself firmly in Roman territory calling for the analysis and documentation of key spaces in the city in terms of their spatial components, solid and void relationships and tectonic qualities. In a process that is not dissimilar to parametric modeling, iterative investigations of fundamental form-generating processes are made at different scales. (The difference however, is that these spaces can be actually drawn from direct observation.) Then, the fluidity and capacity for reinterpretation gained from these exercises is then brought into relationship with a specific site and program of inhabitation. From this dialectical relationship between a “new language of form

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on the one hand and the currency of one’s own actual experience on the other – a true architectural education proceeds.”3 But what is it about Rome that is particularly conducive to this form of enquiry, more so than Brooklyn, Toronto, or Los Angeles? Topographies of Roman space The ‘generic city’ of the present is characterized by a particular spatial signature of objects and infrastructure, floating in an undifferentiated agglomeration of public and private space. One of the paradoxes of modernity is the possibility of living in ways we have never encountered before in the past. The pervasive reality and proliferation of the ‘non-place’ however, as an outcome of the reductive spatial strategies of the generic city, actually recognizes only one form of relationship. On the other hand, in Rome, the complex gradations between public and private space are drawn from the superimpositions of ancient, mediaeval, early Christian, baroque and modern layers, creating strange and mysterious inner worlds that take precedence over private space. The nuanced spatial sequences from outside to inside and the ephemeral qualities that this can bring continue to expose the failings of contemporary urban planning and architecture elsewhere. Such an engagement with Roman topography draws on a complex dialectic between formal Cartesian geometries and topographies of chance. Indeed, the overall cultural achievement of Roman urbanism may be its ability to retrieve something of the sensual immersion and unpredictability of the wild nature itself. Rome more than most cities comes closest to a retrieval of what the philosopher Edward Casey has spoken of as the wild place’s sensuous surface, “its inherent palpability.”

The ‘meanings’ that come into being through the relationship between people and architectural space involve a certain dialectic between the moving frame of an unfolding spatial narrative and the fixed image of contemplation. Any notion of a habitual centering schema such as the urban grid is countered by the constant perceptual shifts in the architecture. Lars Spuybroek has utilized the term ‘topological vagueness’ to describe the movement-architecture relationship that seems specifically characteristic of Roman topography. Streets unfold like a cinematic narrative in which architecture acquires a language of movement, i.e. ’splitting’, ‘merging’, bending’, twisting,’ generating a dynamic sensibility without actually moving itself. Our own perception and activity engages with the subtle geometric displacements of the buildings that relate directly to the movement of the body.”4 This way of experiencing space differs from the more familiar Cartesian schema, resembling instead a kinesthetic engagement with the world. In a Cartesian environment, convenience and ‘habituation’ tend to close out the larger world of nature. Rome’s complex interaction between the temporal, the typological and the topographical is critical to understanding its inherent palpability. It is simply best experienced on foot. In this way the distinctive character of the place and its perceptual depth is further developed through a process where “palpitation and vision and kinesthesia (can) combine synaesthetically, to be joined, perhaps by audition and olfaction, in a way that we can sense sounds as emanating from certain surfaces, and odors clinging to them.”5 This immersive experience of the city however is further colored by a distinct set of social frameworks embedded in its architecture. Heterotopic Armatures In the large elbow formed by the river Tiber, across from the Roman forum and the Campo Marzio, lies the district of Trastevere. Histori-

cally the district housed newcomers to the city. Framed by the former workhouse of San Michele on the lower part of the river and the Regina Coeli prison lying further upstream, the neighborhood’s informal western boundary stops somewhere below the villas and elevated prospect of the Gianicolo. Because of Trastevere’s constant influx of new people, its evolution over time has been an ongoing source of social experimentation, the site of many heterotopic institutions. Earlier Papal munificence not only extended to the construction of churches, hospitals and charities, but into other more worldly interests such as the creation of a tobacco monopoly and officially sanctioned gambling (Loggia of Montettorio). Fascist youth centers and cinemas were to follow during the interwar period and the post-war era saw the Christian Democrats add hostels for the homeless and drug addiction clinics to the mix as if to thank the left-leaning population of the district for their lack of support. Such a complex mix of programs and typologies does not normally constitute a recipe for urban vibrancy. And yet in spite of this, Trastevere thrives as a robust and at times overwhelming urban theatre. Public space forms the lifeblood of the district, creating a series of heterotopian armatures. These are places that operate quietly as the locus of poetic reverie, overlaid periodically by festivals, vigils and mass demonstrations as well as the self-organizing everyday ritual that remains one of the enduring traditions of Italian life; la passeggiata. Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere forms one point of orientation in these informal routes that extend through a labyrinthine circuit of intensively traversed streets back towards the River Tiber, across the pedestrian bridge of Ponte Sisto and arriving in the Campo di Fiore. The evening promenade is a chance for everyone to see and be seen (vedere e farsi vedere) lending the streets and piazzas of the area an intrinsic theatricality where one is

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both performer and observer. Architecture as a conceptual and material practice From his lesson of Rome, Le Corbusier proclaimed an architecture of pure platonic geometries and a certain ruthless logic of Roman construction, from which he extracted his ideal types. Yet this reading forms just one aspect of the complex spatial narrative contained in the architecture of the city. It seems more accurate to describe Rome as a collage rather than a city of pure geometric objects.6 This completely un-Platonic sensibility of the city suggests another way of looking in which nothing is generalized, idealized or generic and where the most humble or non-descript items of everyday life can have their own characteristics. The buildings and spaces of the city are not only a product of a set of relations but exert a certain agency, materializing a hidden presence of their makers in ways that are complex and unpredictable. There is also a hetero-chronic dimension to this architecture that provides a fertile ground for the imagination, albeit an unsettling one. Our relationship to a past remains palpable and yet unfamiliar, as unreachable as the future from the position of the present. Time, Dark Space and the Disorientation of Ruins The great archeological open landscapes and the melded composite assemblages of streets and squares, create architecture characterized by its darkness as well as its light. This chthonian otherworldly dimension to Roman architecture, located in the darkened interiors of ancient ruins and churches, provokes a kind of stillness and psychological interiority; a space withdrawn from the virtual world of the internet and the distractions of shopping and commerce. The sense of interiority and layered chronologies is further complemented by the presence of the ruin; its fractured raw state or delicate detail provoking a temporal dislocation, bridging the phenomenological realm with the psychological.

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The French psychiatrist and philosopher Eugène Minkowski made some specific observations about space in terms of light and darkness and their overlapping relationships. Light space is the space of vision and corresponds in part with Le Corbusier’s summation on Architecture as ”the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.”7 However, Minkowski regarded dark space as something more positive than simply the absence of light: “While light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is filled, it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him: hence “the ego is permeable for darkness while it is not so for light: the feeling of mystery that one experiences at night would not come from anything else.”8 Minkowski speaks of dark space as a lack of distinction between ourselves and the milieu: “dark space completely envelops me and penetrates me far more than light space; the distinction between inside and outside and, as a consequence, the distinction between the sense organs also, in so far as they are destined for exterior perception, play only a completely unimportant role here.”9 This encounter suggests a deeper aspect of space as lived through the palpable experience of matter; one that also opens us to the underworld of mythological space-time. Like a dreamscape, it operates in a timeless dimension separate from our ordinary reality of metric time. This potent disruption of time in dark space resonates with another pervasive phenomena of Rome, the ruin. Dylan Triggs, in his extensive reflections on the relationship of the ruin to the landscape of a city (be it the remains of an industrial factory or the relic of an ancient civilization) identifies a particular characteristic of the ruin to dissolve boundaries between the past and present triggering a temporal uncertainty. “The peculiarity of the ruin is that it forces materiality to adhere to the logic of unreal-

ity. It is a place that cannot be seen, except in a fleeting fashion. But can it be grasped as a concept? With this breakdown in thought and sense, anxiety enters the scene of the ruin.”10 Through the voided space of the ruin “history and memory are visible in terms of the felt experience of what is now absent.”11

meaning to everyday acts. Beauty’s embarrassed exit from the discourse of contemporary design, its dismissal as ’mere beauty,’ or its replacement with the more restrained intimation ‘elegance,’ negates the very condition that psychologists have shown make people feel good, which in turn makes them think more creatively.

Such a synaesthetic encounter with the architecture of the ruin binds time, memory and personal identity in a sensual recollection located somewhere between the past and the present. Yet overlapping this ordering of space and time, Triggs observes the “psychological themes of depth and surface, hidden and revealed meanings, latent and manifest content.”12 Each of these pairings, so central to the workings of analysis, finds a counterpart in the ruins of Rome, a city of contending pasts acting as triggers to the architect’s imagination. While the archaeologist might be interested in mentally reconstructing certain aspects of the city from the fragmented forms, the architect uses it as a triggering device to speculate on the potential for new spatial relationships.

If we replace the sentiment for Roman history with the sediment of Roman history, we return to an interest in the nature of things in themselves, in their materiality and the extraordinary sets of relations that they invoke. These sensual and uncanny configurations of space permeate through our own bodies in all their temporality, sexuality, mobility and expressiveness, pointing to some evolutionary trait in us that wants to aestheticize the interactions between the world and ourselves.

Hovering somewhere between a saturated present and a ghostly evocation, the sensual experience of Rome, like the peculiar quality of a ruin, has the capacity to make the familiar strange, and it is the potential of this quality in the shaping of artistic language that allows new artistic and social alignments to emerge. Unlike the archaeologist, Le Corbusier’s sketching and documentation of the ruins of Pompeii, betray no anxiety or desire as to achieving a faithful historical restoration of the building as it was. Instead, out of the material of the surviving ruins emerges the transparent specter of a new architecture, fusing a modernist spatial typology derived from cubist painting.

The late art critic Robert Hughes, recalling his first encounter with Rome as a young architectural student in 1958 noted; “… the jets of Bernini’s Piazza Navona, glittering in the sun mediate with an almost incredible beauty and generosity between Nature and Culture. Thanks to its fountains - but not only to them - the Roman cityscape constantly gives you more than you expect or feel entitled to as a visitor or, presumably, a citizen. What did I do to deserve this? And the answer seems ridiculously simple. I am human and I came here.” The lesson of Rome makes students of all of us and requires us to inhabit the city as a practice in awareness, however briefly, and to be inhabited in return by the city itself, in a way that traces its presence in every threshold we subsequently pass through. For some, this may yet cripple them for life, but for many it may liberate them.

On Beauty; an afterword Rome reaffirms the notion that architecture gives beauty and

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1. Sola-Morales, Ignasi de, Differences. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1997, p.21 2. Biehle Frederick, The Actual and its Double, ‘In Process Rome,’ Pratt Institute School of Architecture Publication, 2004, pp 36-39 3. Biehle op.cit 4. Spuybroek Lars, Nox, Thames and Hudson, 2004, p.227 5. Casey, Edward, Getting Back into Place. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1993, p.210 6. For an interesting discussion of collage as a pedagogical tool see Caradonna Anthony, ‘In Process Rome,’ Pratt School of Architecture publication, p.19 7. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture. Dover Publications, 1985. 8. Minkowski, Eugene. Lived Time. Translated by Nancy Metzel. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. English Trans. from (1933). Le temps Vécu: Études Phénoménologiques et Psychopathologiques. Paris: d’Artrey. 1970, p.429 9. Minkowski Eugène, op.cit., p.432 10. riggs Dylan, The Psychoanalysis of Ruins, 3AM magazine, www.3ammagazine. com Dec 9, 2012 11. Elsewhere Triggs shifts his observation to focus only on urban ruins, “not classical ruins, such as those one might find on the tourist trail in Rome, Italy, or indeed in Athens, Greece. “For the present purposes, classical ruins lack the close proximity to the present to dislodge, disrupt, and disarm our experiences. Instead, through being colonized by the heritage industry, the ruins of antiquity remain sedimented within a mythologized time; namely, ancient history. In doing so, they become not only inaccessible to our everyday experience, but also outside of time.” Architecture and Nostalgia in the Age of Ruin (Presented to the University of Bath, Architecture Department, January 15th, 2010) In spite of the question of colonization, it is the aspect of ‘being outside time’ that I find significant. 12. Triggs Dylan, op.cit. See also, Trigg, Dylan, The Aesthetics of Decay, Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason. New York, Peter Lang, 2006.

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Ryszard Sliwka, Society of Friends for the Preservation of Neutral Gray, detail, acrylic on canvas Ryszard Sliwka,Â Spring Rift, detail, acrylic on canvas

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Carlo Scarpa

i want to see things, i donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t trust anything else. i place things in front of me, on the paper, so i can see them. i want to see, therefore i draw. i can see an image only if i draw.

PROPOSITIONS

Proposals for the Capitoline Hill Overlooking the Imperial Forums

City of Composite Presence The protective envelope encasing the “proposal to build in the historic center of Rome”, which had shifted the debate on how to build into one of whether to build; whether to acquiesce to the archaeological demand to isolate (and museify) the fragments of the roman legacy, to physically separate the past from present use, and subsequently to judge the contemporary architectural project impotent, incapable of standing together with the past, and to propose to effect this separation by means of an invisible edge, a retaining wall, nothing more than an inverted police barricade or - to find a contradictory position in the conscientious desire to remove those same barriers and integrate, juxtapose, even pollute that same legacy, generously accepting the accretions of time, up to and including the present, with all of its impurities and faults. To accept the sacrifice of a singular past for the benefit of a cumulative present... has perhaps been removed. With the initial demolition and re-construction of the Ara Pacis by Richard Meier, it may be true again that to venture into this territory of supreme history one need not be either guarded by the special, although temporary, status of the artist (Christo) or trespassing by way of a criminal act (graffitist). We (they) fear the ‘present’ because it no longer plays by the same rules. Erasure operates irrevocably, without the possibility of a return to what once had been. And the Rome that is extant, that of the what once was, is even more prescient in light of what has been taken away. With the enormous building programs of the 1920s and 30s, where is the single project that stands comparatively to even the most minor urban interventions of the 17th or 18th centuries? It is no wonder that the public’s trust with architecture has been severed. The contemporary project has misplaced its humanist roots. Perhaps the greatest truth revealed by the Nolli plan of 1748 is its sense of a city ‘being lived’, something that reveals itself, 174

not just by virtue of its physical characteristics, the recognition of an infinitely porous and contiguous reality in the face of its actual density, a density that compacts the 18th century plan together with all of its 2500 years of history. But also in the narrative possibilities suggested by the figure ground technique itself. As the black ground supports the more obvious figural itinerary of the public space, so too does it subscribe to its own limitless hidden narratives.

FACULTY: Erika Hinrichs Lawrence Zeroth Anthony Caradonna Francesco Mancini Laura Abrahams Frederick Biehle

With the implementation of the Fascist Era Regulating plan of 1930, the continuity of the historical city was broken forever. It is now divided by the lines of erasure, into the indeterminate openings of the ‘present’ (now already past), and the islands that remain of what once was. The challenge of today for any project, real or imagined, is to re-establish a public trust, to prove that a work of the present is capable of standing beside the great urban inventions of Rome’s past that make up this remarkable city. Dyslexic Parameters- the Project Site Trajan’s Market has recently reopened as a Museum of the Imperial Forums. Since the late 1980s the excavated boundary to these forums has been shifting relative to the contemporary city, in effect growing the archeological park and reducing the traversable area of the “livable” city. The re-revealing has moved forward with a confidence in spite of the absence of a clear plan for reconciling the sectional intersection of past and present. The two levels must ultimately interact and resolve their pending confrontation lest the temporary solution, the retaining wall, the signifier of occupation, become permanent. The inclusion of Trajan’s Market into the forum complex is perhaps prescient as it stands as a clue from at least two periods that can each suggest a resolution of boundary. The Via dei Fori Imperiali, however, remains the elephant in the room, a grand avenue bisect-

aerial view of the project site

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Roman Wall, Via Veneto, 1973-74

ing any desire to make the past whole, and too critical to vehicular traffic to be removed or relocated. It therefore stands guard by default over the insatiable appetite for more excavation and archeological museification. Mirroring the position of Trajan’s Market, directly behind what would be the western exedra of Trajan’s Forum is an open area defined primarily by its verticality, an edge of the Capitoline Hill. It is an area whose vicinity has undergone constant reevaluation and peripheral transformation since the early Renaissance. As one can see from Lanciani’s plan the Imperial setting of the hill was primarily unbuilt landscape. The rock escarpment has always presented a problem for, but not an impediment to, intervention, whether Imperial (the Forum of Augustus and Trajan’s Market in particular) or post-Imperial (Campidoglio, Cordonata, and Monument of Victor Emanuelle). This sectionally problematic and irregularly configured area was the site selected for the studio projects intervention in 2007, 2008 and 2009. It traverses the entire vertical ascent/ descent from the floor of the Forum of Caesar to the crest of the Capitoline Hill. Michelangelo’s project for the Campidoglio reoriented the Capitoline hilltop, reversing its face from that of the Forum, the center of the Imperial city to the Campus Martius, the medieval core lying beyond it. The monument of Victor Emanuelle reposited an absolute hierarchical dominance for the Capitoline hill entering the 20th century, shifting its center again, raising its vertical overlookingness and lookingtoness, and giving it a more literal axial rela176

tionship with the corso and a neoclassical perspective for the city’s larger urban plan. But the immediate area was altered most irrevocably by an act of erasure performed with clear conscience during the height of the fascist era. Its purpose was part of an “opening up” of the historic center- to the health of light and air, to the avenue of parade, to the speed of the automobile, and to its most “valid” Imperial and historical symbols. Mussolini’s plan concluded by constructing a physical connection between the present (Palazzo Venezia) and the past (Coliseum) the parade route of the Via del Imperio. It dissected not only the Imperial Forums but required the wholesale demolition of the Alexandrian district, an area repopulated in the 16th and 17th centuries, thus clearing the void that now stands before or between the cumulative hilltop appearance of Victor Emanuelle, S. Maria in Aracoeli and the Campidoglio on one side and the extant remains of the Forums of Augustus and Trajan on the other. The three projects of the Capitoline hill stand together in a somewhat symbolic embrace- each has been allowed to remain by virtue of its supreme importance individually, and yet collectively, they present a lesson in architectural “compromise” at a nearly heroic scale. As such, they stand in for what has been lost, the repetition of that very same lesson as it had been applied in all diverse manner within the urban context that has been wiped away. The site also holds certain remnants, urban anomalies waiting to be addressed. Witness the church of SS. Martina and Luca by Pietro da

Cortona, one of his master works that has lost all relationship to its ground and is quickly becoming a nearly inaccessible island unto itself. Or the Carcere Maritimo, now buried to a “present” level or Armando Brasini’s entrance to the Museum of the Risorgimento, a fascist era addition that interacts quite persuasively, if indirectly, to reconnect the hilltop with the triumphal avenue below. Reconciling the sectional dissonance between the ancient and modern levels was a principal task of the studio. Within this circumstance was an intended opportunity, to learn from the urban lessons of the city of Rome itself, so as to order and to integrate the present with the past, not as part of a museum, but as tactile layers of a still living history. The Hybrid Program The intention of the architectural program is multivalent. First, to address the limitations of the retaining wall as a means for connecting the city’s disparate ancient and contemporary levels. Second, to provide for a variety of interconnected spatial itineraries that can ascend/descend the Capitoline Hill: public, semi-public, and private. The sectional lessons of the initial exercise were intended to provide a nearly unlimited set of possibilities for challenging the circumstances of this particular site and negotiate the vertical schism between the lofty height of the Capitoline Hill and the valley floor of the Imperial Forums. And third, it must satisfy the requirements of three primary programmatic elements: Element I: Forma Urbis Romae

An Institute for Historical and Contemporary Urban Studies, independent, nonpartisan think-tank studying issues related to cities and urban development. Element II: Chamber Music Performance Hall Performance Hall seating 350 people which can also be used for conferences associated with the Museum/Think Tank Element III: Gallery of the Historical Maps of Rome Itinerary on the history of Rome including such critical maps as the Nolli Plan and Rodolfo Lanciani’s Forma Urbis in its original size Each of the three primary programmatic elements come with distinctive demands. By being conjoined, the hybrid result must address individually (through exhibition, performance, assembly and housing) as well as collectively the ongoing issues of contextual integration. As a whole the project is intended to act as a mirror to the cumulative nature of the city’s larger context. The student projects that are included were all initiated by an examination of Rome’s textual ground (PRECEDENT), extracting from it certain physical and spatial artifacts. Transformed and reassembled, they allude to invented episodic narratives, a Rome yet to be imagined. The hybrid problem promotes combinatory thinking about program and its manifestation as form. To research and consider strategies of assemblage and joinery is to reexamine the city itself. Rome’s urban body is the composite building project writ large. It is in fact, too large to come to terms with in a single 177

Demotion of the Alexandrian Quarter Rodolfo Lanciani, Plate from his Forma Urbis Romae, showing the area of the project site, with ancient and contemporary plans both indicated.

semester. Nonetheless, the examination of an individual moment is to reflect upon the relationships between the scale of the hand to that of the mind. Therefore it is appropriate that the critical representation of this work is in section, where the synthetic relationship between parts is revealed. Through these efforts the student may come to terms with a very different possibility: that of being a contributor to something much larger than themselves. This realization will hold even greater significance for where the student may go next. Because the desire to be unique in ones work and to achieve acclaim for being unique has now been put into a relationship with what might be necessary to improve and contribute to the public good. And with the idea of a civic good comes a different responsibility. Frederick Biehle, coordinator

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Overlay onto a detail of the Grand Plan of Rome by G.B.Nolli, showing areas of demolition around the Capitoline Hill during the Fascist era, 1924-32, from Roma Tra Le Due Guerre by Italo Insolera and Alessandra Maria Sette

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Project site seen from the rear terrace of the Vittoriano

Chelsea Lipham critic: Erika Hinrichs Forma Urbis Romae: an Institute For Historical And Contemporary Urban Studies which includes a gallery, concert hall, and think tank. Preliminary investigations of existing spaces in the city informed the design of several interlocking spatial armatures that not only connect pieces of the program together, but end up becoming the program themselves. These armatures, or pathways, are assembled as a way to navigate through the site from public to private, historic to new, concert hall to think tank. Connectivity and navigation between the pathways occurs as sectional conditions within the highly vertical site, and each separate program is visually connected by a series of light shafts that cut through the landscape. New pathways and new connections between the programs emerge at each level of the plan, re-informing the way a traveler may experience the space over and over again.

right above: layered connection; vision and access between paths - assemblage right below: site context and axial relationships

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PROGRAM ELEMENTS gallery: Roman Forum to Imperial Forum

concert hall: Campidoglio

PROPOSITION archive: Imperial Forum to Campidoglio

think tank and public path

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first level plan gallery and archive

second level plan gallery, archive and offices

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third level plan think tank and offices

fourth level plan think tank, concert and apartments

PROPOSITION

185

186

PROPOSITION

187

Andrew Bloomfield critic: Erika Hinrichs The project is organized as a collection of three collaged forms. The first is the Think Tank proper and is shaped as a more centralized form with certain appendages. The Chamber Music Performance Hall has an axial extension (as in the relationship of the Manca Lungo to the Piazza Quirinale) although it also serves to scale the hill across its length connecting the Forum Level to the hilltop. And the Gallery of Historical maps, also primarily an axial form with end irregular end shapes and secondary parallel routes. It connects from the side of the Vittoriano to the Church of SS. Martina and Luca and runs perpendicular to the Music Hall axis. All three of the elements are superimposed and so offer unexpected spaces of overlap and interconnection sectionally.

ENTRANCE

ALTERNATE ROUTES BASED ON PRIVACY

HINGING SERVES CONNECTION TO ALTERNATE PROGRAMS

ELEMENT III: GALLERY OF THE HISTORICAL MAPS OF ROME

COMBINATION COLLAGE PROGRAM / FORM DEVELOPMENT

HOUSING

CULMINATION OF PROGRAMS NEW AXIS

RESEARCH / ARCHIVE

ELEMENT I: FORMA URBIS ROMAE

CULMINATION POINT

ELEMENT II: CHAMBER MUSIC PERFORMANCE HALL PROGRAM / FORM DEVELOPMENT

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PROPOSITION

top view PROGRAM SPECIFIC FIGURE GROUNDS

PIAZZA F.U.R

IMPERIAL ROMAN FORUM

CAMPIDOGLIO

SITE FIGURE GROUND

ELEMENT I: FORMA URBIS ROMAE

ELEMENT II: CHAMBER MUSIC PERFORMANCE HALL

ELEMENT III: GALLERY OF THE HISTORICAL MAPS OF ROME

VISUAL / LIGHT CONNECTIONS

ANCIENT ROMAN FORUM DIAGRAMS @ 1/64” = 1’- 0”

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3 5

1_ GALLERY ENTRY 2_ BOOKSHOP / BAR 3_ GALLERY DIVISION POINT 4_ EXHIBITION SPACE

1_ SPATIAL KNOT (GALLERY AND PERFORMANCE) 2_ SPATIAL KNOT 2 3_ GALLERY UNIT

5_ PERFORMANCE HALL ENTRY (BRIDGE) 6_ CONNECTION TO FORUM LEVEL

4_ GALLERY ENTRANCE FROM F.U.R 5_ F.U.R WORK ROOM PLAN 1 @ 1/16” = 1’- 0”

first level

second level

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PLAN 2 @ 1/16” = 1’- 0”

PROPOSITION

3 2

1_ F.U.R URBAN COURT 2_ F.U.R ENTRY 3_ F.U.R HOUSING

1_ F.U.R ADMINISTRATION / CONFERENCE ROOMS 2_ F.U.R RESEARCH LAB 3_ F.U.R ARCHIVE

4_ PERFORMANCE HALL (SEATING) 5_ PERFORMANCE STAGE 6_ VISUAL CONNECTION (F.U.R + PERFORMANCE)

4_ PERFORMANCE HALL SERVICES

PLAN 4 @ 1/16” = 1’- 0”

PLAN 3 @ 1/16” = 1’- 0”

third level

fourth level

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B C

D B

A_ SECTION THROUGH MAIN AXIS (BRIDGE FOR PERFORMANCE HALL) AND SPATIAL KNOTS B_ SECTION THROUGH GALLERY AND EXHIBITION SPACES C_ SECTION THROUGH PERFORMANCE HALL AND THINK TANK D_ SECTION THROUGH GALLERY SPACES AND THINK TANK

section A

section B

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section C

PROPOSITION

GALLERY SECTION @ 3/16” = 1’- 0”

section D

SECTION B @ 1/16” = 1’- 0”

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194

PROPOSITION

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Dave Anderson critic: Lawrence Zeroth Rome exists in the present as the result of many influences throughout its history, the cumulative sum of form and space shaped by the events of its past. The prospect of building anything in Rome, much less in a position alongside the Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill, is a daunting task â&#x20AC;&#x201C; one which must address with respect and sensitivity the accumulation of its history. In a place whose landmarks date back two millennia, new construction is not only looked upon with a decidedly critical eye by its citizenry but comes with the responsibility of sensitivity in its examination and excavation of the land it proposes to rest upon. Although it has been slow during the post war period, Rome has a longer unique tradition of construction which is heavily dependent on upon the foundations of that which came before. Using this tradition as a model, the most basic strategy of Museo Populus was not to pursue complete autonomy as a singular statement, but rather to build from a series of relationships and juxtapositions on the site itself, and focus on its context. The building must rest on a sound, conceptually integrative foundation, strategize a joint that allows for a seamless conceptual connection to its immediate site, and rise as a structure of residual form with a deserved place in the rich fabric of the city. The programmatic constraints for the building called for it to act as many different entities. Containing a museum, a chamber-music auditorium, a publicly funded think tank and housing for its visiting scholars. While the coordination of each of these programs within a single structure was a difficult process - especially against the constraints of structure, access for different types of participants and of the tight configuration of site and its topography - the aspect of incorporation of different parts lent itself well to conceptual foundation of the Capitoline Hill. Though the building holds many specifically designed and initiated aspects, none is more important or influential than the museum. As a public program, the museum offers a slow but precise path that starts from the foot of the hill near both ancient ruins and the massive base of the Vittorio Emmanuelle monument, and carves its way up to the Campidoglio and a perch overlooking the Roman Forum. The circulatory path through the building, up the hill, 196

reincorporates an idea of thoroughfare and of motion, presenting a space that does not just become a corridor or space designed to connect two things, but a singular space formed of composite presence. Ideally, the museum becomes a place of enlightenment and understanding, framing the history of the city and the hill through immersion rather a more sterile encapsulation and isolation of a subject. The individual submerges oneself into the depths of the hill and then re-emerges at its summit, having gained a unique understanding of the fabled history of the Capitoline Hill as the ancient and contemporary center of the city.

PROPOSITION

197

first level plan

second level plan

198

third level plan

fourth level plan

PROPOSITION

199

200

PROPOSITION

201

Sidong Lang critic: Frederick Biehle The project begins by siting three fragmentary facades, each associated with a program while acting in response to a particular urban situation. The first is for the Chamber Music Performance Hall sitting at the crest of the Capitoline hill and visible from Piazza Campidoglio between the Palazzos Senatorio and Nuovo. The second is for the Gallery of Historical Maps which sits beside and perpendicular to the entrance to the Risorgimento Museum framing the narrow passage up the hill beside it. And the third is the long view, both of the larger Forma Urbis Think Tank, but also as it is seen across the open space of the Imperial Forums. From these three positions the project seeks to link up or connect them all through interior sequences and exterior, while scaling the hill and contributing to a greater sense of relationship and continuity.

facade I chamber music performance hall

facade II gallery of the historical maps of Rome

facade II Forma Urbis Romae 202

PROPOSITION

Nolli figure/ground plan 203

geometry study

204

concept sketch

PROPOSITION

205

first level plan gallery and archive

206

second level plan gallery, archive and offices

PROPOSITION

207

third level plan think tank and offices

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fourth level plan think tank, concert and apartments

PROPOSITION

209

fifth level plan concert and apartments

210

PROPOSITION

section A

section B

211

section C

section D

212

PROPOSITION

section E

section F

213

gallery of the historical maps of Rome

214

PROPOSITION

215

Naciem Nowrouzi critic: Erika Hinrichs The project consisted of two phases. For the first phase, a kit of parts was created using the existing spaces of Vittorio Emanuele II monument in Rome. We were able to analyze the characteristics of the various spaces and identify their unique qualities. The parts were then re-configured into a catalogue of possibilities, suggesting an unlimited number of ways for developing various architectural expressions.Â Following this, three programs were introduced which consisted of a Think Tank, Chamber Music Auditorium and gallery.Â The initial configurations were reevaluated and refined in order to respond to the requirements of the three programs with consideration to the dramatic site conditions along the eastern edge of the Campidoglio. The outcome of the design project was a new structure that was fully integrated within the fragments of the roman legacy highlighting particular moments along the ascent of the hill- the Forum Julia, the Cortona Church, the rear of the Vittoriano, and the overlook of the forum. The emphasis was on the urban archeology of the site, by allowing the building to often act as a backdrop and frame, and thus juxtaposing between the old and new, where the new was simple, plain and integrated as a way of participating in the larger order of the site.

216

top view

PROPOSITION

217

first level plan

third level plan

second level plan

fourth level plan

218

fifth level plan

PROPOSITION

sixth level plan

219

section

220

renderings

PROPOSITION

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Roger Reichard critic: Erika Hinrichs Located at the heart of the city, this project was to develop a “Center for Urban Excellence”. In order to have a better understanding of this invaluable heritage site and not confuse the thin line between progressive development and a degenerative one, the design process explored Roman urban evolution as a constantly changing conglomeration of unique interconnected spaces. In this project I intended to examine the city’s “residual continuity”, in effect, “that which is not part of it ” or more directly stated, that which has not been erased. Thus, from the beginning, this project began asking me to collect and analyze several physical/spatial artifacts that could be understood to thematically underlie larger and more varied figural narratives. These fragments became the basis for both an extrapolated game of transformation and re-assembly as well as the speculative point of departure for the architectural intervention. One of the very best lessons I learned while in Rome is that the concept of the place goes beyond its strong architectural heritage. It presents a different culture, language and landscape, where history assumes a dominant role in the continuum of time. This is an environment which generates particular responses, specifically toward people and toward an appreciation of urban place. As a result, I strongly believe this project ought to understand, respect, and celebrate the operative terms that exists within the cultural, urban, and economic dimension of Rome. The elements of the city’s “residual continuum” were combed, reconfigured, and altered both in plan and unfolded section. Thus was the pre-codified array of spatial experiences dissected, studied, and re-assembled at its hinge points. One of the biggest challenges was to recognize the difference between an embedded architecture and a form once removed, while devising a series of strategies to change the relationships of parts to whole. Following these strategies, the “Center for Urban Excellence” was, for the most part devised as one continuous ramp, where its negative space folds and unfolds based on dimensions already understood within the Roman urban fabric, while the plasticity of the space tries to address the idea of a think tank as a tool of representation. In order to not eradicate the pre-existing public pathway, the complex became a public bridge that allowed access from the Campidoglio to Roman Forum and Via dei Fori Imperiali. The “Centre for Urban 222

Excellence” was composed of three main parts. The research area, at around two-thirds of the built area, is the largest. Located axially, it houses direct views to both the Mercati Traianei to the north and the Foro Imperiali to the east, where the archives are located. The chamber music hall, which curls between the research area and the gallery space, offers an amphitheater that can house 350 people, while providing an uninterrupted and privileged view of the Foro Imperiali and the Roman Coliseum as a backdrop. The gallery of historical maps, whose axis runs transversally from the research area, is stressed by a large transparent walk-through billboard that displays the history of Rome, while still providing transparency for the Campidoglio’s north corner. The gallery also houses an exhibition space that has space for Rudolfo Lanciani’s Forma Urbis and the Grand Plan of G.B. Nolli, while it cantilevers over the Roman Forum. All three programs try to merge the idea of “interior” and “exterior”, of the circle, of the “body”, and of the city as a constitutive part of the experience.

PROPOSITION

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first level plan

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second level plan

PROPOSITION

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third level plan

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fourth level plan

PROPOSITION

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fifth level plan

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PROPOSITION

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PROPOSITION

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Roma, Leonardo Buffalini, 1551

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APPENDIX Catologue of Episodic Projects

ep·i·sod·ic /,epəˈsädik/ adjective - Containing or consisting of a series of loosely connected parts or events “an episodic narrative” Synonyms: in episodes, in installments, in sections, in parts “an episodic account of the war” -Occurring occasionally and at irregular intervals “volcanic activity is highly episodic in nature” Synonyms: intermittent, sporadic, periodic, fitful, irregular, spasmodic, occasional; nonconsecutive It would seem appropriate that, given the correspondence between urban condition and individual building that is developed in the pedagogy of the Rome Program curriculum that some acknowledgement of similar intentions might be offered by way of example. Thus we provide six seminal examples of an episodic architecture to further illustrate the idea. All are public buildings- four are museums, one is a cathedral, and one a performance hall.

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Neue Staatsgalerie James Stirling Stuttgart, Germany

diagrams - Ellie Chaerim

The Neue Staatsgalerie by James Stirling was brought up at one of our first reviews during the speculation phase. In particular, it was James Stirling’s catalogue of small sketches which had provoked the connection to the larger matrix of possibilities in the student work. It was in these sketches that he was articulating an idea of spatial sequencing, cognizant of the value of an individual moment’s identify but perhaps more importantly how one moment might connect to the next in order to achieve a particular narrative about the city. His Staatsgalerie of course, rises above other projects by virtue of its integration of a public sequence that passes through the museum itself without ever entering the semi-public realm of the ticket holder. In this, it performs like Trajan’s Market although somewhat surreptitiously as the public sequence threads through the building rather that dividing it into separate elements.

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http://www.e-architect.co.uk/stuttgart/neuestaatsgalerie-stuttgart

http://www.worldarchitecturemap.org/buildings/neue-staatsgalerie

https://www.flickr.com/photos/proteus_1945/5827827993

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The Getty Villa Machado Silvetti Los Angeles, USA Machado and Silvetti, with their long standing interest in architectural narrative, were the ideal choice for this project that reframed a formerly pastiche historical re-creation. The architects in effect â&#x20AC;&#x153;purifiedâ&#x20AC;? the villa first, reconciling the second floor with the first and thus completing it as a true historical artifact inside and outside (with the exception of a new grand stair) and then set about to establishing an episodic route that would gradually and sequentially introduce it to the visitor. The route they created is one that proceeds in such a way to allow first a distant glimpse from above and then eventually a full embrace reinforced by an open air amphitheater which gives space for the visitor to admire its incredible artificiality.

diagrams - Kaitlyn Burzon 236

http://www.machado-silvetti.com/PORTFOLIO/getty_ grounds/images/14.jpg

http://www.machado-silvetti.com/PORTFOLIO/getty_grounds/images/05.jpg

http://www.machado-silvetti.com/PORTFOLIO/getty_grounds/images/01.jpg

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Castelvecchio Carlo Scarpa Verona, Italy Perhaps the episodic project par excellence, I can still recall my personal introduction to this building by 35 mm slide. A very good friend was in Italy doing extensive travel, and photographing obsessively, with as was often done in those days, prepaid development included in the cost of the film. Thus, the slides were coming back stateside to me where I collected and held them until her return. Of course as a result, I was taking a kind of virtual tour myself by perusing the slides. The package that included the Castelveccho was overlarge. And I remember my absorption into the process of slowly going through them with my slide viewer, as if step by step, episode by episode, gathering in the long view, but then examining each of the details as well through what must have been 9 or 10 identifiable projects within a project. When I finally reached Verona myself, some 6 or 7 years later, I went directly to the Castle and recreated that experience in the flesh. I took my time; lingered, sketched, photographed as I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to miss anything. At long last I had completed my journey and took leave of the building. Walking down the main street, passing through the roman gateway to enter the oldest section of the city I thought to myself, what next? What else to see here in Verona? In my pocket was still my ticket for the Castle and realizing that it was good for the entire day, turned around and headed back to it where I stayed and repeated my episodic examination until closing.

diagrams - Anna Dwyer 238

Schuyler Klein, 2014

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdq4717Syc1rdan1go1_1280.jpg

https://dome.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.3/68232/131394_sv.jpg?sequence=2

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Casa da Musica Rem Koolhaas Porto, Portugal A cubic element with deformed outer shell, it sits as a closed form in an open plaza of Porto. It spits out a grand-esque stair, drawbridge like, as it is wide and thin, that can initiate a ceremonial entrance. Lodged within it is another cubic formed, this one a pure concert hall box. What would normally be a main lobby has been truncated so to introduce a slow diagonal sequence upward, along the internal street between the inner and outer shells. Like a visitor to the town of Urbino one is moving always on the incline, finding secondary programs of interest along the way, until reaching the grand piazza of the patrons palace. Â

diagrams - Anna Dwyer 240

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/16001962

http://pre01.deviantart.net/ac31/th/pre/i/2012/165/c/8/casa_da_musica__porto_iii_by_nelson84-d53fq0u.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/fe/44/7e/fe447e2b0052b5226bd557f06ac6fc8f. jpg 241

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels Jose Rafael Moneo Los Angeles, USA The Cathedral church of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles is a mighty fortress, but to enter its compound is to escape the trafficked everywhere that LA presents. The first episode is a garden, whose movement through is an ablution, a cleansing in anticipation of the Cathedrals interior. Even though designed as a basilica church Moneo prolongs the episodic sensibility by withholding the expected central axial view. He has turned the building around so that one enters to the side of the transept . Two additional stages in the journey now ensue, one that moves alongside of the primary space of assembly and a second to rotate around and finally situate oneself so as to gain the primary view of the central space and culminating altar.

diagrams - Anna Dwyer 242

http://www.arcspace.com/CropUp/-/media/5cathedral.jpg

http://www.terragalleria.com/images/us-ca/usca35326.jpeg

http://figure-ground.com/data/ola_cathedral/0007.jpg

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MAXXI Museum Zaha Hadid Rome, Italy At one level the Maxxi is a relatively straightforward museum. Its tubular spaces are stacked and might seem to allow for a systematic back and forth up and down movement in order to see and take in all of its public galleries. But while it might just be possible to work out such a route, it has been so effectively disrupted and appendaged, in such a variety of seductions and temptations that a rational approach will never be achieved. The result is a process of getting lost, such that the building will most likely never be traversed the same way twice.

diagrams - Rawan Elnatour 244

http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it/en/progetto-architettonico/

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CREDITS

Students

Faculty Richard Piccolo Emanuela Ricciardi Jeffrey Blanchard Jan Gedayne Lorenzo Pignatti Erika Hinrichs Anthony Caradonna Francesco Mancini Lauren Abrahms Chris Pelley Larry Zeroth Jeffrey Hogrefe Frederick Biehle

Lawrence Blough Jon Zissovici Francine Monaco Karen Berman Paolo Soellner Tom Rankin Paolo Orsini Eugenio Cipollone Mauro Merlo Alessando Coecci Matthew Hual Roberto Simeone Michael McClure Ursula McClure John Wilton-Ely

Critics and Lecturers Bruna Kohan George Hascup Chris Kling Alessandra Capuano Ryszard Sliwka Evan Douglis Peter Zumthor Jeremy King Barbara Littenberg Steven Peterson Jack Sal Alex Schweder Tom Hanrahan Luca Peralta

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2005 Matthew Beck Gary Bielecki Ena Cheung Erin Congdon Emily Demarest Mia Frietz Daniel Greenfield Milton Hernandez Dylan House Beth Huderski John Ivanoff Jae Sung Jung Melissa Kline Katrina Kreitlow Igor Kutsinsky Diana Kwan Raven Lopez Richard Lui Hannah Meeran David Meinhart Jarred Morris James Mulroy Yen Nguyen Ji-Ho Park Marie-Franck Paultre Jesse Porter Pascale Sainte-Louis Mel Sarkor Duncan Simons Mark Vella Omarys Ynoa

2006 Edward Adu Nesef Al-Nesef Jennfer Bishop Mori Buster Kimberly Chin Laura Delaney Delal Demircioglu Jennifer Dempsey Anthony Denaro Caitlin Duffy Jocelyn Elliot Lori Gibbs Ceyda Gokyur Alexander Gryger Brian Jones Zachary Joslow Jessica Kao Natalie Kaspar Aimee Keefer Jaena Lee Jonathon Lee Emily Levy Joanna Matei Tomoko Miyazaki Palmer Thompson Moss Naomi Ocko Joshua Plourde Jon Poppian Nel Price Tara Rodriguez Maria Salazar

Laura Samul Marley Sutton Namtip Thaugsuban Ilya Vilnits Tamara Vlaisavljevic Sabrina Wu Arta Yazdanseta 2007 Sulida Abrev Kathryn Adee Sherry Alberti Noorah Al Salbah James Baldauf Rabia Bhutta Michael Caton Vicky Chan Jean Choi Lucas Chung Stanley Cutsovsky Catherine De Almeida Elizabeth Demello Leslie Eggers Judy Ferreira Asta Firgas Elizabeth Gelpi Daniel Grehel Karl Hohlman Smaranda Iftolde Andreas Ignatiou Joseph Kopta Brian Lamm

Paul Langley Gordon Laplante Dae Wok Lee Adrian Lo Matthew Macher Steve Marchetta Carrie Mcknelly Ashley Murphy Dionysius Neofitidis Giselle Oh Carolina Posada Lauren Puciarelli Giovanni Rabusin Elise Renwick Gillian Sollenberger Darius Somers Joaquin Fenandez-Stearns Paul Stein Giancarlo Tranantozzi 2008 Dana Aljouder Erin Bartling Andrew Bloomfield Joanna Cheung JeanneChiang Irene Chin Gretchen Cobb Kimberly Coca Richard Colwell Jose Cruz Joo Kim Dong

James Driscoll Chris Egenvery Stephanie Gandelman Jason Gross Jose Gutierrez Jasmine Ho Allison Hoffman Samuel Holguin Chelsea Lipham Onelia Lopez Monique Marion Chad Matthias Naciem Nowrouci Jun Pak Anna Perelman Steven Pitera Roger Reichard Cole Reynolds Nicole Rodriguez Adi Samet Aaron Schickling Nga Wan Tang Jintana Tantinirundr Zulmilena Then Brendan Wilkins 2009 Dave Anderson Mohammod Alam Xuedi Chen Erica Cheung Christine Durman

David Evancho Jeremy Fass Iris Fong Zakiya Franklin Amelia Golini Nicholas Gomez Lauren Henfey Isobel Herbold Jerome Hord Elianna Joseph Lydia Kiehborth Bryan Kim Paulina Kolodziejczyk Alan Krischanovich Andrij Kyfor Edwin Lam Kendrick Lam Sidong Lang Katherine Moxham Leslie Nardini Victor Orriola Shafigur Rahman Denice Regino Karl Roarty Adrielle Slaugh Scott Sorenson Katherine Speidel Sean Stevenson Mehnaj Tabassum Nickisha Vanderwyst Sarah Walsh Weiyun Wang

Patrick Wyszynski

Jeffrey Luong Miles Paloympis Laura Petit Sonia Rossi Natalya Shimanovskaya Insuk shin Allison Spinelli Kamilla Teixeira Brandon Turner Irina Vittitskaya Laura Wickesberg

2010 Nathan Abbe Laura Amaiei Michael Archer Danila Babko-Malyi Soyung Bahng Jessica Becker Guillermo Bernal Colin Burton Michael Cabrera Alexander Chiarella Sofia Chen Preston Church Evan Cronley Michael Dolatowski Katherine Donkersloot Hilda Duque Nicholas Feihel James Freeman Jason Golob Sasha Grishina Nicole Grosso Kyle Harrington Scott Hicks Samora Hodges- Smilke David Irwin Jessica Israel Eunice Koo Ariana Lader Jing Liu

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Pratt Institute School of Architecture Administration 2017

Biographies

Thomas Hanrahan, Dean Kurt Everhart, Assistant to the Dean Pamela Gill, Assistant to the Dean

Richard Piccolo is a painter and an educator living in Rome. He has showed his work extensively in Europe and the United States as well as completing several large mural cycles in the United States. He has a Bachelor of Industrial Design degree from Pratt Institute and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Brooklyn College. He has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and the Edwin Austin Abby Fellowship in Mural Painting at the American Academy in Rome. He is an adjunct Professor of Drawing and Watercolor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture Rome Studies Program and for the Pratt Institute Rome Program. He has been the Program Director of the Pratt Rome Program since its inception in 1978. Frederick Biehle is an architect and an Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute. He represents the third generation of a Northern Ohio family dedicated to the fine and decorative arts. In 1986 he was awarded a Prix de Rome allowing him to live and study in Italy for two years while researching the remains of ancient roman urbanism. He has been the coordinator of the Pratt Undergraduate Architecture Program in Rome for the past twenty years, whose curriculum introduces some of the lessons of that initial research while focusing on large scale urban intervention. He founded his own practice in partnership with Erika Hinrichs in 1997. Ryszard Sliwka is an educator, architect, painter and occasional writer who has worked, exhibited and published in Italy, Canada and the USA. He currently lives and works in Bath, England. His interests have been shaped by a fascination with the archaic in architecture and painting and the way this can deepen our experience of space and time. His urban inclinations gravitate to the complex topographic gradations between public and private space that still operate in the traditional city yet often remain absent in contemporary urban planning. Jeffrey Hogrefe is Associate Professor, Architecture, Humanities and Media Studies and founder and Coordinator of Architecture Writing: Language/Making, a transdisciplinary initiative of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and School of Architecture at Pratt Institute. His innovative shared pedagogical research has resulted in a series of experimental courses in language instruction, as well as symposia and publications in collaboration with a faculty of writers. Hogrefe studied architecture and language at the University of California, Berkeley with Christopher Alexander and has written extensively on space, subjectivity, architecture, language studies, artist and architecture biography. He is at work on a book, The Abolitionist Landscape Project, which proposes a remapping of the Potomac River Valley for an alternate present.

Pratt Institute Administration Thomas F. Schutte, President, Pratt Institute Bruce J. Gitlin, Chair of the Board Mike Pratt, Chair to the Board of Trustees Kurt Pillow, Provost Undergraduate Administration Erika Hinrichs, UA Chair Jason Lee, Assistant UA Chair Adam Kacperski, Assistant to the Chair Latoya Johnson, Administrative Assistant Juliet Medel, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Advisement Terilyn Stewart, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Advisement Pratt Institute Rome Program Richard Piccolo, Director Frederick Biehle, Academic Coordinator Emanuela Ricciardi, Director of Student Affairs Production Team Sidong Lang Schuyler Klein Anna Dwyer Frederick Biehle, advisor

Photo Credits

Site descriptions in the Speculation Section and Catalogue of Episodic Projects are by Frederick Biehle 248

Frederick Biehle Sidong Lang Various students

20, 25, 46, 52, 73, 85, 113 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 55, 101, 125, 143, 126 33, 36, 49

Afterword: Erratum on the Rome Program’s Foundation Frederick Biehle

In our previous publication on the Rome Program from 2004, Richard Piccolo and I attempted to assemble an accurate record that could recount the originating of the program. The first paragraph reads: In 1978, largely through the insight and dedication of the late professor, Christopher Wadsworth, The School of Architecture at Pratt Institute began offering a program for the study of architecture and Italian culture in Rome. Based on that documentation we have been tracking the program’s duration in preparation for a celebration during its 40th year, a remarkable milestone. As it turns out, that research and all the assumptions that have gone with it, was not accurate. In December of this last year John Lobell brought to my attention an alumnus of the school, Stephen Valentine, who had informed him that the Rome Program came into existence based on his own personal efforts as a second-year student in 1973. This then, is a correction of the record, in Stephen Valentine’s own words: September 1973 I approached Professor Chris Wadsworth and Gene Dean (former Pratt’s Dean of Admissions, and then newly appointed Director of International Programs) about forming a program for students in Rome. I submitted a memo addressed to Professor Wadsworth, titled, “WHY ROME?”. December 19, 1974 There was a committee/workshop set-up for ’74-75 External Programs. The workshop consisted of nine faculty and two students (I was one of the two students).

February 28, 1974 A memo from Theo David addressed to the International/External Programs Committee supported the idea of Foreign Study Programs as offering value to contemporary practice. March 13, 1974 The initial sign-up sheet indicated enough interest for me to present to Chris Wadsworth to get his involvement to formalize a 1974 Fall Rome Program. May 2, 1974 Official approval of the Rome program. May 17, 1974 Acceptance letter to attend the Rome Fall Program. Note: A personal note from Director Gene Dean, “Without you, there would be no program. You are a great farmer. Gene” June 1974 Rome Program Fall 1974-75 Final Outline. Resident Director or Pratt Person in Charge of Program: Christopher Wadsworth, Stephen Valentine. Spring 1975 A major multi-media exhibit and presentation in the Higgins Hall theater of Rome Program’s first year (the Pratt public relations office promoted the event city-wide) President Jerry Pratt, and much of the senior administration attended. The rest as they say, is history. And so, as it turns out, we have been preparing to celebrate the 44th anniversary all along. Thank you, Stephen Valentine, class of 1978, for bringing this to light.

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Pratt Institute 200 Willoughby Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11205 School of Architecture 61 St. James Place Brooklyn, NY 11205 Telephone 718-399-4304 www.pratt.edu