Urban composition: Imaginary versions of Rome inspired by memories and possible scenarios (original) (raw)
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Urban compositions inspired by memories and possible scenarios
ARCHITECTURE HERITAGE and DESIGN Mercanti Vie, 2020
This paper investigates the composition of heterogeneous fragments, excerpts from the inventory of collective memory, and the resulting unpredictable architecture in an urban context. The freedom to assemble figures or fragments, to place them in another context, highlighted the effectiveness and decisiveness of a reading of urban design in which the figurative force is the result of consideration based on the visual relationships between objects. The experiences presented outline certain unreal circumstances, but nevertheless inspire a scale evaluation of the results of planned modifications, and suggest corrections, adjustments and new possibilities. The experimental setting, that some may deem fantastical, is derived from the superimposition of an existing environment and works introduced from other contexts. In this way, the artist can redesign and foreshadow, creating a fictional city that can paradoxically serve as a reference in the development of new possible urban settings. The juxtaposition of well-known architectures to provide form to new spatial connections in the environment verifies new unthought-of opportunities to compose buildings and monuments that modify the space. The inventions resulting from the union of individual architectures into unitary visions that donot organically belong together is a particular iconography in which buildings abandon the passive and ornamental function thanks to which we have got to know them and reacquire an actively elevated rolein the project.
LEARNING FROM ROME Historical Cities and Contemporary Design
The evolution of cities can be interpreted through graphic elements, as recommended by Marco Pollio Vitruvius (1st century BC), whose forms of expression (plans, elevations and perspectives) are revealed as precious and reliable instruments to read the cities. Establishing mapping elements, they appear as representing cities and in various stages of construction of their urban networks. The iconography is an important element of analysis that allows a careful reading of the "reality" of cities at specific times. In addition to understanding them as representative of static moments, they allow the current reinterpretation of the urban fabric. Adding new elements may be important in reading the cities, which are considered as dynamic tools for its understanding. Regarding cartography and iconography of various eras, we propose to make a comparative analysis of the historical urban fabric of two cities with deployment capabilities and differentiated urban development (Évora and Setúbal). To achieve our goals, we will read the morphological elements of the Medieval City (fortification, street, square, medieval blocks; market; singular buildings) and its iconography in order to understand its diachronic evolution between their similarities and differences.
LEARNING FROM ROME: historical cities and contemporary design
The results of research in urban morphology describe historic cities as urban organisms whose survival, transformation and management needs design-based complex actions to be investigated by analytical tools integrating different knowledge. Architecture, History, Geography are speculative discipline and provide useful tools to properly direct architectural projects, whether they are conceived or not in continuity with the urban and architectural language of the traditional existing context. Preserve and renovate the historic cities and the historical urban tissues should be a new focus of urban policies and of those entrepreneurs and conservation professionals which have identied the abandonment of these urban realities as the emerging political and economic dynamics. The scope of the conference is to collect studies, research, design and methodological reections on contemporary architecture, urban contexts and historical building, directing the outcome to the denition of operational tools useful for a aware and contemporary design. In recent years the reuse, the recovery, the architectural transformation of urban fabric are among the most practiced topic of the international architectural culture based both on open interpretations or limited to the aspect of conservation. The conference will be an opportunity to discuss on contemporary design in the historic city, on tools and research methods to be applied to these architectural dynamic realities, and on operational tools used for designing such meaningful anthropological spaces. ________________________________________________________________________ Veja-se o resumo do artigo " Cartography and iconography as diachronic analysis tools of the urban fabric ─ Évora and Setúbal (ABSTRACT)" na secção "PUBLISHED PAPERS".
Talking City: Voices of Hidden History in the Architecture and Urban Places of Rome
disseminate | analyse | understand graffiti-scapes, 2024
Our cities today represent a complex intersection of material and immaterial culture, which can be described and promoted through possible heritage itineraries. Among the various topics of these itineraries, a topic of great interest for us is the writings traced throughout history on the wall surfaces of the city’s buildings to convey messages and opinions for the most diverse purposes. Their value is not only in the quality of the single artefact but also because they can serve as unique keys to understanding the society that produced them in depth, i.e., to comprehend the culture, customs, and ways of communication of a specific historical period. From this point of view, the inscriptions produced by the ruling classes, the secular and religious power are less exciting than those traced by single or common people. Therefore, these traces of the past are a fundamental historical resource since the people’s voice resides in them; they are an intangible heritage transmitted through the materiality of the supports and architectures on which they were traced or placed. Unfortunately, many of these inscriptions are hidden or barely visible within cities. Besides, their decoding is related to the type of handwriting, the engraving technique, and the content conveyed. Finally, in today’s society, there is a prevalent dominance of the image with clearly conveyed content, relegating these kinds of cultural products to an omitting background. The study presented in this paper, at an early stage of development, is developed within Rome, a city characterised by a complex and deep cultural stratification. The research aims to map some graffiti and ‘minor’ epigraphs (i.e., non-monumental or particularly solemn) and build narrative itineraries throughout the city, starting from a study of these particular traces within the architecture. By enhancing these historical sources through these routes, the architecture will become a narrative system capable of telling stories, giving voice to real-life stories and the immaterial culture condensed in those places, and rediscovering a stratified and hidden intangible heritage in the city.
Overlapping itineraries through arts: constructing and reconstructing an urban image
Urban Life and Contemporary Arts, 2013
The urban image of a city relies both in real and imaginary constructions and reconstructions embedded in diverse cultural manifestations such as architecture, literature, cinema, photography and visual arts. There are places and spaces that dwell somewhere between reality and imagination as extensions of filmic fictions, particularly in cities like New York and Venice. Accordingly, the literary universe itself comes to the definition of places like the London of Dickens, kafkian Prague or Joice’s Dublin, relating specific features of these authors and their works with cities they described in a particular way. “The City that Never Sleeps”, “The City of Light” or “The Eternal City”, just to mention some, belong to the collective memory beyond their physical experience and the reality of vision. Thus, the experience of a place is simultaneously framed by the spaces we actually know and experienced elsewhere, as well as by the hunting and recollection of other’s personal experiences, that is, by looking at something through someone else’s eyes, building up an imagetic memory with spatiotemporal depth. In line with Maurice Halbwachs, a memory is always a memory of memory, and it is that memory that defines the image of a city. This paper focus on the elaboration of a summer course in Portugal for students from EUA, with different backgrounds, and with different levels of historical and artistic knowledge, as the ground to explore the heterotopic nature of the city of Lisbon through the image conveyed by key figures and events of Portuguese culture, and their role in shaping its urban character. The syllabus of the course established urban itineraries that were organized in four blocks named as following: “Architectural Promenades”, “Cinematographic Viewpoints”, “Stage Mappings in Literature” and “Artistic Spatial Narrations”. Each explored different creative interpretations of the city and specific conditions of the urban through different artistic formats highlighting qualities and identities and therefore overlapping disparate realities. The aim was to develop an historical imagination, to see events and issues in their contemporary setting through different interpretations, rather than relying on current hermetic descriptions. By migrating from one interpretation to another that could, sometimes, meet and interfere, students were supposed to hold in their possession a collection of perceptual and personal images, from which to draw their own urban map of the city through a graphic or written piece developed from processes of association, a kind of psychogeography as formulated by the Situationist International. The conceptual conception stemmed from speculative, plural and fragmented interpretations sets the stage for multiple relational processes with a existence of its own, beyond its original setting, allowing an understanding of the real both as tangible and fictional, and the creation of “another real”, more complex and personal derived from mutual interactions of real and mental sites implying subtle associations by means of mnemonic processes of collage. Accordingly, this paper aims to relate the discussion with a broader theoretical reflection on how representation can be understood not as an autonomous feature but rather as a potential device to (re)transform reality and anticipate the future.
For many architects, who attribute to memory a fundamental role in their creative process, Rome and its multiple spatiality have been and continue to be extraordinary sources of inspiration. Its ruins, expression of the fragment and unfinished condition, have been used as a bare architecture, pluging in a new building, or as a layer on which build up the following one. Their building systems and urban role have attracted architects from different eras. Its Renaissance buildings show how architects have been able to adapt the principles of symmetry to the irregularity of the sites, generating exciting new solutions. Thereafter, the baroque architects change the relationships between architecture and urban space and create innovative devices for shape the light. This great repertory of space, intervention strategies, architectural themes that Rome offers, is used by many modern and contemporary architectes that, starting from their experience of those places, have studied them and reuse, reinterpreting them in their projects. Among them, the intervention aims to deal with two Italian architects: Alessandro Anselmi (1934-2013) and Francesco Venezia (1944). Both have selected from this extensive repertory buildings and places, that, captivated by their memory, could emerge later, providing strategies and meanings to their projects.
2018
Reading and Drawing A drawing (a plan, a section, an elevations, an axonometric projection or a perspective) can express or show the peculiar physical, spatial, technical, anthropic, historic condition of a place. From this statement, we developed the idea of drawing as a research investigating the different qualities of a place, aiming to discover and understand the several hidden stratified layers. Just like overlapping paper, if seen in the correct juxtaposition, they are capable to give new meaning to a project. Drawing and redrawing is a process through which the specific conditions of a place could be synthesized and therefore communicated. Drawing is a tool of knowledge: it allowed us to transpose the visually crowded Palazzo and its sensorially rich physical substance to a two-dimensional support. Some information clearly gets lost through this process, but much more is gained, since the action of drawing is mediated by perception and its influence on thought. A drawing is, in fact, always something more than a simple imitation of an object, including our own interpretation of the built environment translated in lines on paper. Drawing is something similar to reading and remembering, rather than something connected to creative intuition. As an act of memory, drawing implies subtly one's own culture, ideas, attitude, that mixes together with the perception of the physical space that is intended to be represented. All these features come together in what could seem like a trembling line, but containing in itself one's own
O. Carpenzano, A. Capanna, A. I. Del Monaco, F. Menegatti, T. Monestiroli, D. Nencini eds., Creativity and reality. The art of building future cities, 2020
“Ars simia natura”, a concept that cuts in two the history of the arts hence the modern figurative revolution has depleted architecture to a mere branch of the visual arts: architecture instead possesses its own compositive techniques. This paper considers the dialectics between type and model in architectural composition as a metaphor outlining the elements of a design theory focused on meaning. The proposed theory founds itself on the transposition of Raffaele Panella’s teachings to the domain of Urban Morphology and adapting them for the purpose to achieve meaning in architecture. The contemporary project should accept any restraint imposed by the context, and fit within the processual evolution of the surrounding urban tissue, but by considering the collective memory it should also use recognisable elements to communicate, the design models (Carpenzano 1993). Every designer uses a model in his design activity, but not all are aware control of this creative process. The use of models in composition, not to be confused with the copy, belongs to an ancient school of thought, dating back to Aristotle, and feeding the history of architecture, all the way to the best tradition of modern architecture. We can find reference to the use of models in architectural composition in the design activity of “Gruppo Architettura” in the ‘60 in Italy and in the project for East Rome, designed by Raffale Panella, Costantino Dardi and Carlo Aymonino for the XV Milan Triennale in 1973 (Aymonino, Panella, Dardi, 1973). The other part of the dyad is the architectural type, or to better say the processual development of urban tissues, according to the Italian school of Urban Morphology (Maretto, 2013). This theoretical approach to architectural design enhances the strong continuity between the typological evolution of the built organism and the building to be designed (Strappa, Carlotti and Camiz, 2016). We can therefore infer from the context the deformations to apply on the selected models (Panella, 2008), so to include in the project not only the context and the models, but also their meaning.
Architecture of the city reinterpreted: a critical review
Design Studies, 1985
When Aldo Rossi first published his monograph L'architettura della cittd in 1966, he probably did not imagine that in 1982 it would not only have been republished three times in Italian, but also translated and published in Spanish (in 1971, with four subsequent republications), German (in 1973), Portugese (in 1977), French (in 1981) and in English. The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago) and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (New York) were jointly responsible for the English edition of Rossi's monograph, published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press in 19821.While the prolific translation and publication of any book is no guarantee of its academic worth, nor its internal coherence, it is rare for a contemporary architectural monograph to generate such wide appeal. Therefore it is interesting and perhaps instructive to analyse Rossi's contribution to current architectural theory, to highlight the merits and shortcomings of his monograph, and to relate his approach to other contemporary contributions, particularly those which explore the mediations between the spatial and the behavioural features of the built environment. This is the purpose of this review paper.