PROJECT(S) OF ANAMNESIS: Roma, Agency of Better Living
I am a force of the Past.
My love lies only in tradition.
I come from the ruins, the churches,
the altarpieces, the villages
abandoned in the Apennines or foothills
of the Alps where my brothers once lived.
I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana,
down the Appia like a dog without a master.
Or I see the twilights, the mornings
over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world,
as the first acts of Posthistory
to which I bear witness, by arbitrary
birthright, from the outer edge
of some buried age. Monstrous is the man
born of a dead woman’s womb.
And I, a foetus now grown, roam about
more modern than any modern man,
in search of brothers no longer alive.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, 10 Giugno (in Poesie in Forma di Rosa) , 1964
When we imagine the soil of Rome after millennia of trampling by its inhabitants and we visualise the earth of the forum pounded by countless footsteps of the mob, as architects, we must try to decipher that ichnography. This is the initial painting of Rome. This painting have determined every possible direction or meaning Rome has taken, for there is a prescription of all directions or meanings before any single one is inscribed. And so, in the beginning is the ichnography—the plan, the integral, the set of meanings or directions, the potential, the capacity. Full Voluptas. Each specific direction or meaning is merely a scenography—a profile seen from a particular vantage point. Everything Rome became and is it is just one profile of the set. Every emperor, every pope, every architect: just one profile of the set situated in a specific time and space.
Todays profile: once expanded over the Aurelian walls, Rome has evolved into a sprawling urban archipelago, a tapestry of ‘daughter cities’ yearning for harmony. Since the 1960s, Rome’s relentless expansion has created true enclaves within the city, turning some neighbourhoods inward and breeding conditions ripe for squatting and tangled connectivity issues. Between 1997 and 1999, an astonishing 198 micro-cities were identified within Rome, unveiling a tapestry-like cityscape composed of numerous urban islands, each teeming with its own distinct identity. This variability is a hidden treasure, brimming with untapped potential to enrich and enhance the city’s overall wealth and functionality. Profiles and variations.
Despite Rome’s population remaining stable at around 3 million residents over the past two decades, a demographic shift has unfolded, pulling people away from the historic center to the sprawling areas beyond the GRA—the 70-kilometer ring-shaped motorway that encircles the city: this is going to be our site. Today, fewer than 200.000 residents remain within the Aurelian walls, while 1.8 million have settled between the walls and the GRA, and 1 million resides farther out, beyond the GRA. This outward migration has transformed the once peripheral suburbs into well-established urban areas. Yet, many of these neighbourhoods still grapple with a lack of essential services, schools, and workplaces. This shortfall forces residents into daily internal commuting, surfing the sprawling web of the GRA back and forth. The ring-shaped motorway, burdened with heavy incessant traffic, has become the stage for a daily spectacle of movement and congestion, as the city's pulse extends ever outward.
The GRA became a terrifying wound that never heals. On its sides lie shreds of the city—indecipherable neighbourhoods, obscene buildings, roads leading to nowhere. The innermost recesses of a non-folkloric Rome reveal themselves to its citizens, who can do nothing but surrender to the estrangement of subjective vision as the GRA is a delirious frame that cruelly encloses and excludes. On either side, enigmatic, absurd, and disturbingly surreal zones emerge, inhabited by authentic people—families, prostitutes, men and women whom society neglects. Near the GRA, the essence of the metropolis evaporates, giving way to a shapeless, suspended world—tragic and funny, almost fantastical and dreamlike. The GRA, far from being just a ring road, symbolises the potential for a united, thriving Rome, where every neighbourhood and urban island contributes to the city's vibrant tapestry. Yet, for the GRA to truly offer an integrated road system, the cities beyond its bounds need improved connectivity and visionary planning. Mobility issues, flood-prone areas and dwelling conditions are pressing considerations that demand both abstraction and invention.
What kind of collective memory arise in a vague territory, of everyone’s and no one’s? Which kind of lifestyle architecture proposes over there? How to inhabit the GRA? Starting from redrawing Roman models of collective and public life (Baths, Fori, Palaces, Convents, Arenas, … ) the GRA is the profile of Rome we will shape during the semester. By looking at GRA as ‘one site for any intervention’, the studio will spin around the intriguing hypothesis that ‘housing +‘ could truly discover and affirm ways of inhabiting the GRA in which architecture offers fantastic places of public encountering.