SAHANZ 2017 QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today?

Proceedings of
the 34th Annual
Conference of
the Society of
Architectural
Historians,
Australia and
New Zealand

Canberra, Australia
5—8 July 2017

QUOTATION: What does history have in

store for architecture today?

Edited by Gevork Hartoonian and John Ting

University of Canberra
QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today?
Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zealand

Edited by Gevork Hartoonian and John Ting

Published in Canberra, Australia, by SAHANZ, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-646-98165-9

The papers in this volume were presented at the 34th Annual Conference of the
Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, held on 5-8 July
2017 at the Shine Dome, hosted by the University of Canberra, Australia.

All papers accepted for publication were blind reviewed by two referees; papers not
accepted by one of the referees were blind reviewed by a third referee whose
decision was final. Papers were matched, where possible, to referees in a related
field and with similar interests to the authors. A full list of referees is published at the
back of these proceedings.

Copyright of this volume belongs to SAHANZ. Copyright of the content of individual

contributions remains the property of the named author or authors.

All efforts have been made to ensure that authors have secured appropriate
permissions to reproduce the images illustrating individual contributions. Interested
parties may contact the editors.

Other than for fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or
review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and Copyright Amendment Act
2006, no part of this volume may be reproduced by any process without the prior
permission of the editors, publisher and author/s.

The Proceedings are a record of the papers presented at the annual conference of
the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ).
Publication of the research documented in these Proceedings underscores the
Society’s commitment to academic freedom and academic integrity. Conclusions
drawn from this research have been tested through appropriate formal academic
review processes. The Society upholds the principle of a member’s ability to express
a view or form an opinion based on these conclusions. However, the conclusions
and views expressed in the Proceedings do not necessarily reflect the views of the
Society.
QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today?

FOREWORD

Recalling Goethe’s theory of ur-phenomenon and considering the Eiffel Tower as a montage of
various elements, Walter Benjamin presented quotation as the Geist of a theoretical break with the
vulgar historical naturalism, and as a means to grasp the construction of history as such: as meaning
in the structure of commentary. Benjamin was not alone in using quotation as a strategy to
deconstruct historicism. We are also reminded of Karl Kraus, who used quotation not to preserve, but
to purify, to tear from context, to destroy the established totality. Considered as a fragment, quotation
can play a critical role in putting together the large construction (historiography) made out of smallest
architectonic elements, the detail.

In general we are asking, what do you quote and to what purpose?

Recent historiographies present anachronism as a theoretical paradigm to dispense with the

historicist certainties, which most often try to cement the historian’s tendency for period style,
solidifying the linear progression of history. Even though quotation seems to be natural to
historiography, it’s hard to find a text or manuscript that does not use quotation to re-activate the past,
either to confirm a claim, or to expand the scope of the historiographical implications of another claim.
In both cases quotation introduces interruption, a pause in the presumed linearity and natural
extension of the narrative. But what is it that makes a sentence or an idea quotable? And why is it that
throughout history both architects and historians have used citations, if only to save a place in the
linear progression of history? The historian’s interest in quotation might be that it says something
about an event and/or serves as a reminder of the accuracy of a fact, a recollection. Or else, citation
forces the sentence to depart from its subject matter, historical facts and events in order to enter into
the realm of what might be called insight, which can also mean in-cite, or in-site. Insightful
observations, nevertheless, can become facts in their own right after being quoted and referred to
repeatedly. Interestingly enough, Manfredo Tafuri makes a distinction between those who use
quotations “to build a new reality” and those who use the same quotations “in order to cover up the
disappointments of reality.” In addition to the Benjaminian concept of historiographic montage, what
quotation means for architectural historiography is this: that the text, an assembly of facts, processes,
events, and insightful observations offers quotable fragments when it inaugurates or establishes a
different historical knowledge.

The conference convenors would like to thank all the authors, referees, organisers, keynote speakers,
sponsors and volunteers for their generosity in contributing to the 34th Annual Conference of the
Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand

Gevork Hartoonian and John Ting

Conference Convenors and Editors of the Conference Proceedings

SAHANZ 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings

QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today?

CONTENTS

FOREWORD i

KEYNOTE: viii
Figures Of The Architext
Jean-Louis Cohen

KEYNOTE: ix
‘The Rational and The Robust’: Jennifer Taylor and the historiography of
Australian Architecture
Julie Willis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS x

Quoting the Familiar: Critical Image Making in the Age of Digital 1

Reproduction
Jacqui Alexander and Thomas Morgan

An Analogical Quotation 13
Ramatollah Amirjani

Interpretation/Translation/Quotation? Contemporary Architects’ 25

Interventions into Multicultural Australia
David Beynon and Ian Woodcock

Assembled: John Ruskin’s Architectural Ideal 35

Anuradha Chatterjee

Australia’s Big Dilemma: Regional/National Identities, Heritage Listing and 45

Big Things
Amy Clarke

Ideal Urban Space in Gainsborough’s Charity Relieving Distress, 1784 57

Georgina Cole

Quotation in Wittkower’s Neo-Palladianism 67

Scott Colman

Rudolph Schindler’s Church School Lecture on Decoration: A Preliminary 77

Reading
James Curry and Stanislaus Fung

From Outside Into Inside Out: The Domestic Interior as a Foundational Site 91
in Twentieth-Century Architecture, Psychoanalysis and Art
Anna Daly

Quoting Ian Ferrier (1928-2000):Contributing to Queensland’s Post-War 101

Modern Church Architecture
Lisa Marie Daunt
 iii

“Fitted for Sacred Use”: Vatican II and Modernism in the Physical, Social 113
and Ritual Space of Three Australian Churches
Ursula de Jong and Flavia Marcello

Revisiting Quotations: Regionalism in Historiography 125

Macarena de la Vega de Leon

Out of Context 135

Penelope Dean

The Verbal and Visual Languages of Kenneth Frampton in Architectural 143

Design, 1962-1964
Sally Farrah

Architectural Footnotes: The Chicago Tribune Tower 155

Cristina Garduno Freeman and Vicki Leibowitz

Campus, Context and Community: Residential Colleges and Halls of 167

Residence at Australia’s Post-war Universities, 1945-1975
Philip Goad

Elementary, My Dear Watson? Don Watson’s TAFE Colleges, 1992-97 181

Janina Gosseye

Image Building: A Study of Australia’s Domestic and Foreign Policy in 193

Relation to Embassy Architecture
Rowan Gower

Form and Design for India: Achyut Kanvinde’s Reflection on Louis Kahn 205
Maryam Gusheh and Prajakta Sane

From the Acropolis to Kingaroy: Creating Civic Culture in Queensland 215

Alice Hampson and Fiona Gardiner

Jorn Utzon’s Graphic Quotation: Le Corbusier and the Sydney Opera 227
House, 1957-1966
Glenn Harper

Kenneth Frampton: The Violence of Quotation 237

Gevork Hartoonian

How a Statue Can Shape a City: Sydney’s First Monument, Governor Sir 245
Richard Bourke
Michael Hill

“To be With Architecture is All We Ask”: A Critical Genealogy of the 255

Serpentine Pavilions
Susan Holden

Quoting Palladio 267

Renata Jadresin Milic and Graeme McConchie

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QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today?

An Architectural-Urban Strategy: Re-reading Rowe and Koetter’s Collage 279

City
Michael Jasper

Avant-Quotation: Imitation, Conventionalization and Postmodern Practices 289

of Reference
Elizabeth M. Keslacy

Poetic Structure and Popular Taste: Yamasaki, Emerson, and the Delicate 299
Balance of Form and Tectonics
Joss Kiely

Columns of Light: Louis Kahn’s Design for Sanctuary of the Mikveh Israel 307
Synagogue (Philadelphia, 1961-72)
Peter Kohane

In Search of Invention: Buhrich’s Modern Architectural ‘Quotations’ 315

Catherine Lassen

Quotation, Architecture and Chinese Ancestor Worship 325

Mengbi Li

Bracketing: The Immediate Historicity of Asia 333

Francis Chia-Hui Lin

Semblance of Use: History, Function and Aesthetics in the Serpentine 343

Pavilions
John Macarthur

Sleeping Beauty: Aesthetics of Ruin, Corruption and Rome 353

Lina Malfona

Duelling Quotes: James Marston Fitch’s ‘Murder at the Modern’ 367

Harry Margalit

The Hidden Territories of the Digital Line 377

Linda Matthews and Gavin Perin

Sincerest Form of Flattery: Imitation and Early Prison Design in New 389
Zealand
Christine McCarthy

Mothercraft and Model Cities: Ethno-Symbolism and Emblems of 399

Nationalism during the 1927 Royal Visit to Wellington
Christopher McDonald

Alvar Aalto: The Organicity of Quotation 411

Andrew Metcalf

Who has Written What on the University of Auckland’s Clocktower Building 423
(1920-26)?
Bree Meyers and Julia Gatley
 v

Encoding and Transferring Transience in Housing: Linking the Architectural 433

Heritages of Migrant Hostels and Public Housing in Victoria in the 1960s
Renee Miller-Yeaman

Comparative (Post)Colonialisms: Residential School Architectures in 443

Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand
Magdalena Miłosz

After Pratolino: Costantino de’ Servi and the Italian Renaissance Garden in 459
England
Luke Morgan

Death Mask: Fetishizing Tradition Through Citations 471

Ali Mozaffari and Nigel Westbrook

Difference and Repetition: Reactivating Traditional Tokyo Architectural 483

Elements in Nezu
Milica Muminovic

The Mediterranean on the West Coast: R.J. Ferguson and Rottnest Island 493
Andrew Murray

“The Pleasures Functions of Architecture”: Postmodern Architecture and 503

the “Culture of Flimsiness” in Queensland
Elizabeth Musgrave

Tradition in Mid-Century Houses of Shinohara and Kikutake 515

Marika Neustupny

The Goorawin Shelter: Ed Oribin’s Contribution to the Aboriginal Housing 525

Panel
Timothy O’Rourke

Rethinking Replicas: Temporality and the Reconstructed Pavilion 537

Ashley Paine

‘Ernest Fooks - The House Talks Back’: Between the Savage and the 549
Scientific Mind
Alan Pert and Philip Goad

Internment “Homes” as Material Texts: The Architecture of Canada’s New 561

Denver Internment Camp
Anoma Pieris

To The Editor of the Australian: Francis Greenway’s Letter of Quotations 573

Jennifer Preston

Digital Fragments and Historiographies: Data Mining the William J Mitchell 585
Archive
Peter Raisbeck and Peter Neish

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QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today?

Robin Boyd and the Quotation: Translating Public Words to Public Building 595
Peter Raisbeck and Christine Phillips

Negotiating Modernism: Renewing Image and Relevance Through Church 607

Design Within an Increasingly Secular Post War Australia
Elizabeth Richardson

Japanese Module Interpreted: De-quotations of Re-quotations on Katsura 619

Villa
Marja Sarvimaki

The Compromised Slab: Koolhaas and Kollhoff Interpreting Colin Rowe 629
Christoph Schnoor

A Designed Incompleteness: Quotation and Transfer in the Later Australian 641

Work of Romaldo Giurgola
Stephen Schrapel and Peter Scriver

Positioning Pluralism in “New Waves” of Post-Modern Japanese 653

Architecture
Ari Seligmann and Sean McMahon

From Drawings to Drawls: Coy Howard’s Artefacts of Architectural 665

Production
Benjamin Smith

Philip Johnson’s Crystal Cathedral: Citing the Loss of Citation 675

Lori Smithey

Baroque Form Generation Practices: A Historical Study 687

Lydia M. Soo

The Architect Says: Myth, Misquotation, and ‘the Mating of a Building’ 699
Naomi Stead and Katrina Simon

The Spirit of Adhocism and Brilliant Selective Editing 711

Andrew P. Steen

The Narrative of the Bungalow: Literary Depictions of the Colonial 721

Bungalows of Colombo, Sri Lanka
Pamudu Tennakoon

Allusions and Illusions in Spanish Architecture, 1898-1953 731

Brett Tippey

Boyd and the Brut: Quoting Robin Boyd’s Words on Brutalism 745
Nugroho F. Utomo

Following the Folly: Quoting, Constructing and Historicising Paper 755

Architecture
Annalise Varghese
 vii

Quotation in the Architects’ Sketchbook: Analysing Nell McCredie’s 765

Sketchbooks
Kirsty Volz

Before Scarborough: John Andrews in the Office of Parkin Associates 1959- 777
1961
Paul Walker and Antony Moulis

The Met Breuer: From Sculpture to Art Museum and Back Again 787
Rosemary Willink

New Canaan in New Zealand: Alington House as Honest Architecture? 797

Peter Wood

SAHANZ 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings

QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today?

KEYNOTE:
Figures Of The Architext

Jean-Louis Cohen
New York University

Literary theorist Gérard Genette, whose book Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree is
devoted to the many dimensions of quotation, has defined the “architext” as “This relationship of
inclusion that relates each text to the different types of discourses in which it is inscribed.” Far from
remaining valid only in territories remote from architectural concerns, the analyses of the “second
hand,” as proposed by Antoine Compagnon, or the concept of intertextuality proposed by Julia
Kristeva and developed by Genette with the architext, are relevant for the study of architectural and
urban forms. Rather than being limited to quotation – understood as the transfer of a phrase from one
design, or one building to another one, intertextual relationships correspond to a wide spectrum of
figures, from literal inclusion to paraphrase, or from condensation to homology. Architectural
intertextuality operates in many realms of theory and practice, and its consideration allows for better
understanding of processes at work within the oeuvre of a given architect, or of the reverberation of
designs from different authors on those of contemporaries, and followers. The paradigm of the
intertext provides a frame within which different types of relationships can be detected, that deal in
some cases with the syntactic dimension of architecture, and in others with its lexical spectrum.
Among these, three distinct systems could be observed: intericonicity – that is the circulation of
images from a particular design to another one; intertectonicity – that is the transfer of tectonic
features from a structure to another one; and also, observing the creation and the development of
cities since the Renaissance, interurbanity – that is the translation of street layouts, open space
patterns, or monumental schemes from city to city. Operating at different scales, these processes
complicate the reflection on quotation, or on such a dubious construct as “influence.” They will be
discussed on the base of an eclectic selection of cases.

Jean-Louis Cohen holds the Sheldon H. Solow chair in the History of Architecture at New York
University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He is the author of numerous books and articles about nearly every
aspects of how modernization has affected the built environment. A specialist in the Russian avant-
garde and the work of Le Corbusier, Cohen’s work has also focused on the multiple patterns of
internationalization, from the colonial situations of Morocco and Algeria to the worldwide circulation of
ideas and forms.
 ix

KEYNOTE:
‘The Rational and The Robust’:
Jennifer Taylor and the historiography of Australian architecture

Julie Willis
The University of Melbourne

The study of Australian architecture has been circumscribed by its chief authors, the most influential
of which have been historians whose wider interests in the contemporary and context of Australia as
place have underscored their work. These authors are also distinguished by their primary training as
architects, giving them a deep interest and understanding of architecture as a process. Robin Boyd
defined not only early Australian architectural historiography, but also the popular imagination of an
Australian architecture. But Boyd took a fundamentally modernist approach, echoed by Max Freeland
in his Architecture in Australia, and their privileging of tectonic purity and belittling of ornament
characterizes the first generation of Australian architectural historians. The first generation of
architectural historians was intent on demonstrating an Australian architecture that was connected to
international trends that proved its pedigree. The second generation was interested in understanding
what might be a particularly Australian architecture, one that was for and of its place, including
historians such as David Saunders, Miles Lewis, George Tibbits and Jennifer Taylor. Of all of these,
Taylor came closest to inheriting Boyd’s mantle, with her enduring interest in contemporary and
architecture of the recent past. Taylor was deeply interested in the late modern and post-modern,
helping to demonstrate the brutalist and regional influences inherent in Australian architecture in the
1970s and 1980s. Her work was fundamental in showing that Australian architecture was not just a
reflection of ideas from elsewhere, but where place, materials and form were defining new regional
approaches. This presentation examines Taylor’s legacy in documenting the rational and robust
architecture of the post-WWII period that underpins understanding

Julie Willis is an architectural historian, Professor of Architecture and Dean of the Faculty of
Architecture, Building & Planning at the University of Melbourne. With Professor Philip Goad, she is
Editor of the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2012),
which won an AIA Bates Smart Special Award for Architecture in the Media in 2012. Her research
projects focus on Australian architecture, undertaking significant work on historic and contemporary
hospitals; architecture in community, education and civic identity; architecture of wartime and its
impact; nationalism and identity in public buildings; and equity and diversity in the Australian
architectural profession.

SAHANZ 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings

QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The convenors of SAHANZ 2017: QUOTATION received 127 abstracts from which were 79 papers
accepted. In the end, 73 papers were prepared for presentation at the conference and publication in
its proceedings. All papers accepted for the conference were blind reviewed by two referees; papers
not accepted by one of the referees were blind reviewed by a third referee, whose decision was final.
Papers were matched, where possible, to referees in a related field and with similar interests to the
authors. The convenors would like to thank the academics and others who gave their time and
expertise to the refereeing of these papers.

The convenors would like to thank and acknowledge the support of University of Canberra, Cox
Architecture, Canberra, and the ACT Chapter of RAIA. Thanks also to Professor Lyndon Anderson,
Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Design, and Professor Steve Basson, Associate Dean of Research at
the Faculty of Arts and Design, UC, for their support of the conference.

SAHANZ 2017: Quotation would also like to thank and acknowledge the following sponsors: The
Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, Architecture Program, Built Environment,
UNSW, Sydney; Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney; Faculty of
Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney; the Faculty of Architecture,
Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, and UNITEC, Institute of Technology, Auckland,
New Zealand.

Special thanks to Cox Architecture, Canberra; Stewart Architecture, Canberra, and Francis-Jones
Mohrehen Throp (fjmt), Sydney.

CONFERENCE CONVENORS AND EDITORS OF THE CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

Gevork Hartoonian and John Ting, University of Canberra

CONFERENCE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Gevork Hartoonian, University of Canberra
John Ting, University of Canberra
Macarena De La Vega De Leon, University of Canberra
Philip Goad, University of Melbourne
Harry Margalit, University of New South Wales

CONFERENCE TOURS:
Patrick Stein and Ann Cleary, University of Canberra

ACADEMIC COMMITTEE
Gevork Hartoonian, University of Canberra
John Ting, University of Canberra
Macarena De La Vega De Leon, University of Canberra
Nugroho Utomo, University of Canberra
Philip Goad, University of Melbourne
AnnMarie Brennan, University of Melbourne
Andrew Leach, University of Sydney
John Macarthur, University of Queensland
Harry Margalit, University of New South Wales
Peter Kohane, University of New South Wales
Maryam Gusheh, University of New South Wales
Christoph Schnoor, Unitec, Institute of Technology, New Zealand
 xi

REFEREES ADMINISTRATIVE
Dijana Alic John Macarthur SUPPORT
Katherine Bartsch Harry Margalit Leanne Groom,
David Beynon Gill Matthewson Ngaio Buck,
Ann Marie Brennan Christine McCarthy Kaitlyn South and
Karen Burns Inger Mewburn Rabab Alhazmi.
Michael Chapman Joanna Merwood-Salisbury
Anuradha Chatterjee Anthony Moulis Thanks also to the
Scott Colman Milica Muminovic Faculty’s volunteer
Sing D’Arcy Elizabeth Musgrave graduate students:
Paola Favaro Emina Petrovic Shannon McGrath,
Julia Gatley Christine Phillips Brendan Searles,
Philip Goad Anoma Pieris Sanaz Farhadi,
Janina Gosseye Peter Raisbeck Billy Ileris, and
Maryam Guseh Andrew Saniga Andrea Ileris
Gevork Hartoonian Christoph Schnoor
Paul Hogben Peter Scriver LOGO AND GRAPHIC
Renata Jadresin Milic Ari Seligmann DESIGN
Michael Jasper Robin Skinner Cox Architecture, Canberra
Ursula de Jong Naomi Stead
Sandra Kaji-O’Grady Bill Taylor COVER PHOTOGRAPH
Peter Kohane John Ting Willinga Park at Bawley
Andrew Leach Paul Walker Point, NSW, by
Hannah Lewi Shaowen Wang Cox Architecture,
Francis Chia-Hui Lin Nigel Westbrook Canberra. Photography
Cameron Logan Julie Willis by Alina Gozin’a
Mirjana Lozanovska

SAHANZ 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings

QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today?

Sleeping Beauty
Aesthetics of Ruin, Corruption and Rome

Lina Malfona
New York University

Abstract
This paper analyses the concept of the ruin, which has been transformed over time from the
image of an ancient, former beauty, characterized by the romantic aesthetic of decadence
and consumption, into a “bachelor machine”. The timeframe within which this transformation
can be examined is the stage of architectural Postmodernism, which began before the 1980
Biennale, with the exhibition “Roma Interrotta” (Interrupted Rome). This event introduced
new ways of understanding Rome’s ruins and the image of the city itself.
 354

Rome n'est plus: et si l'architecture

Quelque ombre encor de Rome fait revoir,
C'est comme un corps par magique savoir
1
Tiré de nuit hors de sa sepulture.

The image of Rome has gradually shifted away from the idea of sublime beauty that had characterized its
past, as if the city itself were slipping into a slumber. Today, the proof of this distance is provided by the
city’s ruins, which can be understood as the dislocated apparition of this former beauty – its citation. In the
ruin, the short-circuit between its original beauty and the corruption of Rome today surfaces, as it emerges
from the starting passage above, extracted from a sonnet by Joaquim Du Bellay.

Although the backdrop for this investigation is the eternal city, the object of analysis is the concept of the
ruin, which has been transformed over time from the image of an ancient, former beauty, characterized by
the romantic aesthetic of decadence and consumption, into a “bachelor machine”, a device that
transforms love into a death mechanism, according to Michel Carrouges’ definition. The timeframe within
which this transformation can be examined is the stage of architectural Postmodernism, which began
before the 1980 Biennale, with the exhibition “Roma Interrotta” (Interrupted Rome). This event introduced
new ways of understanding Rome’s ruins and the image of the city itself, which appears as a physical
body devoid of meaning that can, at this point, be only consumed or placed at the center of savage
2
linguistic games.

Ruins
In the essay “The Modern Cult of Ruins”, Alois Riegl recognized nature’s reappropriation of all manmade
things as a necessary action, in a sort of positive appreciation of decadence, of corruption, of
consumption: “From men we expect accomplished artifacts as symbols of a necessary, human
production; on the other hand, from nature acting over time, we expect their disintegration as the symbol
3
of an equally necessary passing”. Read through this lens, the slow erosion of time and the continuous
transformation of manufactured elements became positive attributes for Riegl: culture’s mortality is,
4
without a doubt, one of its advantages.

The ruin can be read as an imprint of the past, a monument suspended between presence and absence,
5
a sort of materialization of memory. However, in order for the landscape and the pre-existing entities
6
connected to it to become “an operable and dialectic element”, as Vittorio Gregotti claims, it is necessary
that we add to our collective memory those “efforts of imagination” that are explained and realized
7
through artistic works, through a design. In this way, through the analysis and subsequent theoretical re-
founding of the concept of the ruin, it is possible to delineate new methods of operating on the past.

"Ma, confessiamolo, è una dura e contrastante fatica quella di scovare pezzetto per
pezzetto, nella nuova Roma, l'antica; eppure bisogna farlo, fidando in una soddisfazione
finale impareggiabile. Si trovano vestigia di una magnificenza e di uno sfacelo che superano,
l'una e l'altro, la nostra immaginazione. Quando si considera un'esistenza simile (…) ci si
sente compenetrati dai grandi decreti del destino; tanto che da principio è difficile
all'osservatore discernere come Roma succeda a Roma; e non già soltanto la Roma nuova
all'antica, ma ancora le varie epoche dell'antica e della nuova sovrapposte l'una all'altra.
8
Roma, 7 novembre 1786" .
[However, let’s admit it, it takes a difficult, conflicted effort to uncover, bit by bit, the ancient
Rome under the new one; and yet we must do it, trusting in an unparalleled satisfaction in
the end. We have found vestiges of magnificence and deterioration that surpass, in both
directions, our imagination. When we consider such an existence (...) we feel permeated by

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QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today?

the great decrees of destiny; so much so that at first it is difficult for the observer to discern
how Rome succeeds Rome; and not only new Rome as compared to ancient Rome, but
even the various epochs of the ancient and the new city superimposed upon one another.
Rome, 7 November 1786.]

The ruin, the place where beauty and imperfection coincide, is a device that is capable of guarding the
memory of the city, which, in turn, incorporates the ruin in a number of different ways: setting it in the
gears of the new, like the remains of the Circo Agonale, which are incorporated into a background
building in Piazza Navona; preserving it and making it an active part of monumental complexes, as in the
two-faced structure that looms over the Capitol – on one side the Tabularium, on the other the Senatorial
Palace; repurposing it, like Trajan’s Market, which lives on, demonstrating form’s capacity to reabsorb its
function. The ruin has also been a place of reinvention – we have only to think of the critical or
imaginative reconstructions of architectural, urban, and landscape layouts. Villa Tusca and the
Laurentinum, revisited by Schinkel, are an example of this, and the latter, in particular – Pliny’s residence
on Rome’s seafront – has been the subject of a number of reinterpretations. Leon Krier probably supplied
its most sophisticated reconstruction, although it is absolutely unscientific, representing it as a fortified
stronghold on a hill: the postmodern compendium of an acropolis, a medieval town, and a Renaissance
city.

The ruin possesses the dual nature of the fragment, which, on the one hand, evades the idea of
wholeness – according to Adorno’s definition of the fragmentary – while, on the other, is understood as a
portion of the complete work that still contains the larger work’s matrix or genetic code, and thus can
assist us in reading the ancient characteristics of the whole. 9 In this regard, we can think of the technical
representations and conjectural reconstructions of Roman ruins carried out by Giambattista Piranesi, the
initiator of a proper narrative surrounding the ruins: their citation is precisely thanks to their dual nature as
isolated images, fascinating and mysterious, and, at the same time, scientific sources.

Despite the fact that Piranesi understood the ruin as the location of the sublime – his etchings are, in fact,
suspended between lack of scale, instability, and magnificence – the word’s etymology indicates scission
and separation, as if the ruin expressed, with its dismembered body, the crudest image of the fragment.
Think, in this regard, of buildings that have been drawn as ruins, like the Bank of England as a Ruin, by
Joseph Michael Gandy for John Soane (1830), and the “progetto di ruderizzazione” (“ruinization project”)
of the Altare della Patria by Ludovico Quaroni and Carolina Vaccaro (1985).

Let us consider how many ways the ruin has been reinterpreted, altered, and corrupted, until we reach
the total desacralisation of the ruin itself, which occurred in Postmodernism, when the commodification of
the ruin was complete. The post-war period introduced a concept of ruins as fracture, in reference to the
urban fabric of many European cities that had been hit during bombings in World War II. These deep
wounds showed, for the first time, the disiecta membra of the city that influenced a number of architects:
the fragmented, severed, and torn bodies of cities, dissected houses and uncovered, offended, violated
fragments of family life became, for a long time, the ruin.

In reference to the rubble of the stages on which the war had played out and also the contemporary ruins
of abandoned buildings, an idea of the ruin as a discarded element developed. We can think of the rags
that cover Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venere (1976), the image of a lost classical purity. But we can also
think of those cities in the form of ruins, like the now-abandoned historical centers of Matera and of Civita
di Bagnoregio, and the theaters of disaster, like the city of Beirut in Gabriele Basilico’s photographs. Or
even the concept of wreckage that now commands our attention because of the shipwreck of the Costa
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Concordia, the gigantic cruise ship that, run aground in front of the Isola del Giglio, must now be
dissected.

If, on the one hand, a process of desacralisation has allowed the concept of ruin, which has now acquired
new meanings, to distinguish itself from the concept of monument – thus allowing architects greater
liberty in their relationships to the past – on the other hand this process has generated the appearance of
either strident or completely mute projects that treat the occasions to interact with ruins as talent shows.
Instead, when we operate in the presence of archeology, the architectural project should conceive of itself
as a moment of reflection, a pause in which to meditate on the logic upon which the city is founded, a
momentary suspension of the action of transformation, almost like a repentance for such an action. This
condition does not entail a halt of the design project or a concession in the realm of vision, but rather
reestablishes a knowing, critical distance from the city. In the “Progetto per la sistemazione dei ruderi del
porto romano di Testaccio” (Plan for the arrangement of the ruins of the Roman port in Testaccio) by
Franco Purini, the antique presupposes the existence of an impenetrable threshold of indecipherability,
one that makes only memory possible. Here, the ruin is raised up to a pre-textual level, shedding light on
an origin landscape from which the contemporary project can, at this point, only measure its distance.

Quotation, Translation, Corruption

In 1979, Jean-Francois Lyotard, who originated the critique of the classic theories of the Modern
10
Movement, theorized the Postmodern Condition, which eventually became a cultural movement. This
movement was characterized by an aesthetic of play and entertainment, based on the fall of the so-called
“terrorist” motions of the Modern Movement and on their replacement with the representation of the desire
to break off from certain “repressive systems”, countered by a “disalienating excitement of the new and
11
the unknown, as well as of adventure, the refusal of conformity, and the heterogeneities of desire”.
Hence, the postmodern movement started with a constructive deformation of the canons of the Modern
Movement, a sort of corruption.

But what do we mean, exactly, by corruption? Corruption manifests, generally, as the slow, gradual
process of degeneration of a previous status; the Latin term corrumpĕre means, in fact, “to damage, to
alter, and to shatter” In this sense, we can consider the postmodern consumption of the image – its
mediatisation and subsequent ingestion – to be corruptive processes, especially when the act of
corruption is understood as the necessary alteration of a pure original form, aimed at preventing it from
being degraded and confined to a museum, and thus becoming a hibernating body. And yet, corruption
can also be interpreted as an act of breaking the canon, of sudden unhinging or of interruption.

Corruption can be read as a linguistic technique, or, even better, as a process of deformation, analogous
to other techniques of invention like translation or citation. Translation techniques aim at reinterpreting the
original form through transliteration and transfer, or through the generation of variations in scale,
aberrations, or specular images; citational works do so by reproducing or replicating a referent, as a way
of creating copies and homages – a widely-used technique in Postmodernism since its canonisation by
Robert Venturi, who gave the citation a ludic character. But although the concept of corruption is
interpreted as a synonym for moral decadence, there is nothing intrinsically negative in the meaning of
citation, insofar as citation means the exact repetition or reproduction of the original, and such a
reproduction is not a wrongful appropriation, since the citation is explicitly attributed to its source. Citation
is not imitation, in that it admits that the clone or replica faithfully refers to the original: citation is, in fact,
always literal. For this reason, the citation attributes an aura to the original itself, toward which it then
constructs a distance that is necessary to confer a value judgment on the original. Nevertheless, the
citation can be viewed as a process of deformation, insofar as it places the copy in improper contexts: it
eradicates the object from its original context, it dislocates it. Even if one cites the original without

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modifying its form or structure, the simple act of moving it generates a variation, a deformation that
produces an effect of alienation, analogous to what we see in front of us when we find ourselves facing
the ruins of ancient Rome within the contemporary city: the ruins appear to be a dislocated object.

These techniques of deformation – citation, translation and corruption – were utilized in the last act of that
process of desacralisation of the ruin’s sublime image and that of the Eternal City itself: the exhibition
“Roma Interrotta” (Rome Interrupted). As we will see, the projects presented through this initiative liberate
the physical body of the ruin from its meaning, through complex linguistic games, in order to view it as a
12
mere object or a “bachelor machine”.

Infected Venus
“Rome is an interrupted city because there came a time when it was no longer imagined”, wrote Giulio
Carlo Argan in 1978, launching the exhibition “Roma Interrotta”. It came out one year after the publication
of Charles Jencks’ text “The Language of Post-Modern Architecture”, and one year before the premises
that were at the foundation of the book La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, by Jean-François
Lyotard. Conceived by the architect Piero Sartogo and located in Trajan’s Market, the initiative was, in
fact, born as a corruption project, which reduced the city to a playing field for intellectual games, in which
the heritage of the city is altered, manipulated, or violently modified by different authors – or, better put,
interpreters.

Figure 1. Rivisitazione della Nuova Pianta di Roma del Nolli (1748)

(MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma. Collezione
MAXXI Architettura)

Piero Sartogo staged this event through the Associazione Incontri Internazionali d’Arte (IIA, or the
Association for International Art Meetings), whose founder and general secretary was Graziella Lonardi
13
Buontempo, a fundamental player in the organization of this initiative. The idea was to reformulate a
new and visionary image of Rome, starting with Giambattista Nolli’s plan, the “Nuova Topografia di Roma”
(New Topography of Rome, 1748), and to reset the image of the Eternal City to the one given in the plan;
in other words, to erase all the later additions that had polluted the organic image of its urban installation.
The exhibition was carried out, then, as a process of demolition, followed by a post-traumatic
reconstruction. The result was a mosaic of city plans that gave life to a sort of collage-city highlighting its
urban fragmentation. It came to light less from Nolli’s plan than from Giambattista Piranesi’s
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Iconographiam Campi Martii Antiquae Urbis (1757) – for that matter, with the analogous effect of
14
“semantic void due to an excess of visual noise”, observed by Manfredo Tafuri. But apparently Piranesi
was not Sartogo’s only source of inspiration: in fact, as Léa-Catherine Szacka notes, from the Sixties
onward he cultivated a close relationship with Cornell University and, in particular, with Colin Rowe – so
15
much so that the Roman architect applied Rowe’s methodological approach to the project. In Collage
City (1978), Rowe had proposed bricolage as an alternative to scientific methods of urban planning,
based on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ notion of bricolage as a mental structure.

Rome was redesigned by twelve architects who were invited to conceptualize the city without the
deformations it had undergone after the Unification of Italy, without the wounds left by bombings, and
without the demolitions that had occurred during Fascism, resulting in what Argan defined as “a series of
16
gymnastic exercises for the Imagination, whose course runs parallel to that of Memory”. Memory, then,
not history: in fact, Rome’s new city plan, made up of twelve plans, was displayed alongside Nolli’s
original, creating the effect of the historical city’s translation into an evocative, oneiric landscape.

The designs that were displayed subject the ancient image of the city to various processes of
deformation, using complex geometrical and formal procedures alongside logical leaps and visual and
conceptual associations. Piero Sartogo, Costantino Dardi, Antoine Grumbach, James Stirling, Paolo
Portoghesi, Romaldo Giurgola, Robert Venturi, Colin Rowe, Michael Graves, Leon Krier, Aldo Rossi, and
Robert Krier all intended to design against or to unhinge the image of the contemporary Rome, to turn
back time to a past in which it is still possible to tell subjective stories. Nevertheless, these projects,
lacking a structural utopian vision, are configured as pure visions, which do not contribute in any way to
the delineation of an adequate thought process regarding the future of the city. Although some of these
designs did not give up on reading the city as archeological text or palimpsest that is still capable of
transformation, others took refuge in the design to more or less voluntarily escape reality. But since these
architects were working on Rome, and thus confronting the theme of the city’s prior forms and its ruins,
what did they propose as a theoretical re-foundation of the very concept of the ruin, in their attempt to
repurpose it in their plans?

Before we venture into the knots of some of these proposed designs, it is necessary to remember that
during those same years two other planning initiatives based on the revision of the concept of the ruin –
attempts to formulate new proposals on how to construct on the constructed – took place in Rome. The
first was the cultural event “Estate Romana” (Roman Summer), curated by Renato Nicolini, which took
place in a number of the capital’s monumental places starting in 1977, and which introduced the theme of
the ephemeral as a strategy of intervention on these monuments. The second was the exhibition of the
city plans for “Le Città Immaginate: Un Viaggio in Italia. Nove Progetti per Nove Città” (The Imagined
Cities: A Trip Around Italy. Nine Projects for Nine Cities), organized by the XVII Milan Triennale in 1987
and curated by Pierluigi Nicolin. 17 In particular, the Roman section of this exhibition, curated by Franco
Purini, represented the desire to re-conceptualize the image of ancient Rome using, as a starting point,
the plans and the maps that depict it. What were the results of these two initiatives?

“Estate Romana” gave architects and artists a chance to redesign certain portions of the city by
envisioning monuments and ruins as spaces that could be used in the depiction of ephemeral scenes.
Consider, for instance, artists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who reinstated the symbolic value of
certain monuments, from Porta Pinciana to the Arco di Costantino, by temporarily hiding them under
ample wrappings. In his wrapping of these monuments to protect them from pollution, Christo was
inspired by the cleaning campaign for Paris’ monuments, carried out thanks to André Malraux. Thus, a
number of Roman monuments were covered to the point of becoming invisible, in order to sarcastically

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denounce how, often, the needs of protection and conservation end up manifesting as an ineffective
imprisonment.

In the exhibition “Le Città Immaginate”, Ludovico Quaroni’s “timid proposal” for Piazza Venezia, in which
Sacconi’s Altare della Patria is partially demolished in order to give it the semblance of a ruin is, in a way,
18
a project that runs opposite to Christo’s ludic overwritings. We must preface this statement by noting
that Rome’s current urban texture appears as a continual citation of the urban layout of ancient Rome,
upon which, in fact, the modern city rests, using the older city as a foundation. But wherever this
continuity is not respected, like in Piazza Venezia, where the insertion of the foreign object, the
monument to Vittorio Emanuele, blocks the sight of Via del Corso, Quaroni’s plan intervenes to underline,
or to denounce, this abuse.

Figure 2. Ludovico Quaroni with Carolina Vaccaro, Proposal for Piazza

Venezia, “Le Città Immaginate”, 1987. (courtesy Carolina Vaccaro)

Quaroni wrote that the goal of his project was to “desecrate” the Altare della Patria, transforming it into a
modern ruin, in order to cleanse it of any rhetorical memories of the Risorgimento. By corroding the
monument and demoting it to the status of ruin, it would lose its triumphant symbolism:

«In queste condizioni il passato di Roma può addirittura mostrarsi come un impaccio, un
vincolo irremovibile: né mi sembra che lo spirito e la cultura europei dei giovani architetti
romani sia tale da aver superato l’invisibile ma solida barriera “storica” che impone la città.
Mi sembra anzi che i lenocini del Cinquecento e del Seicento siano tali da corrompere in tutti
19
noi, non appena si affaccino alla mente, i buoni propositi».
[In these conditions, Rome’s past can show itself to be a hindrance, an unmovable shackle:
nor does it seem to me that the European spirit and culture of young Roman architects is
strong enough to have overcome the invisible but solid ‘historical’ barrier that the city
imposes. Rather, it seems to me that the little Cinquecento and Seicento flatteries, whenever
they surface in our minds, are strong enough to corrupt all our good intentions.]

An element of exceptionality, a monstrum, the ruin seems to be – within the changing and hyper-
transformable space of the contemporary city – the out-of-place object, the intruder, the Nosferatu. But in
Rome the sublime monster, the memento mori – which has become, by now, repulsive in an eternally
 360

youthful, surgically young world – is transformed into enchantment of the past. And the magnificent
immutability of the Eternal City becomes a devastating barrier against any action that propels us forward.

The twelve architects of “Roma Interrotta” seem to oppose this view: they want to liberate the ruin from its
status as object imprisoned by its own conservation. Only the ruin’s cited, translated, and somehow
corrupted image still allows it to be, to circulate freely, according to these planners, some of whose
proposals will be analyzed here.

If we compare Antoine Grumbach’s plan to James Stirling’s, we can see how both these architects work
on the theme of citation, but whereas the former cites the urban planners that passed through Rome, the
latter cites himself. For both, the process of collage, addition, and subtraction are the components of
urban rhetoric, but Grumbach’s plan is based on an idea of permanence, understood as obligatory
citation, and thus based on the sedimentation of urban plans over time. The design unfolds through the
use of imaginary sections, through fictions. One in particular, the fiction of Via Nomentana, seems
inspired by the theme of the inventory: in his made-up story, the author imagines that the greatest
architects that passed through Rome each left a piece of their plans there, giving life to a sort of hybrid
aqueduct, where the ruins of the past support pieces of the future. This stratified architecture, built on
citations, is made up of stratified fragments: from the dome of Bruno Taut’s glass pavilion in the
exposition of Werkbund in Cologne to Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, up to the designs of Le
Corbusier.

Figure 3. James Stirling, with Michael Wilford, Russ Bevington, Barbara

Weiss, Correzioni alla pianta di Roma del Nolli (la soluzione MAF) e note
in merito all'abdicazione postbellica della professione progettuale, Roma
(MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma. Collezione
MAXXI Architettura)

Unlike Grumbach, James Stirling makes use of a double citation, insofar as on the one hand he cites the
procedures of the collage, in reference to Colin Rowe and Oswald M. Ungers, and on the other hand he
cites his own designs, which he places on top of the map of Rome like fragments of a bombed city. These
designs make up a narration that is contaminated with what came before: the buildings cited are inserted
into the texture of actual, existing buildings and ruins, reconstructing the Freudian image of Rome as a
psychic entity in which all eras coexist simultaneously. But even if the coexistence of the real and the

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imagined is documented, albeit through references and citations of other projects, this montage of
fragments has an obvious ludic nature.

Upon closer inspection, the proposal follows the same procedure adopted a few years prior by Carlo
Aymonino, who, along with Costantino Dardi and Raffaele Panella, came up with the “Proposal for East
Rome”, a plan that was presented at the XV Milan Triennale in 1973, organized by Aldo Rossi. The three
Roman planners took their inspiration from the plan “La città analoga” (The analogous city) and worked
on the materialization of Rossi’s idea, which, in contrast to Stirling’s, took as its starting point the montage
of “pieces and parts” as an aspect of the ruin.

Figure 4. Carlo Aymonino with Costantino Dardi and Raffaele Panella,

Proposal for East Rome, “XV Milan Triennale”, 1973
(Università Iuav di Venezia, Archivio Progetti, fondo Costantino Dardi)

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Rob Krier, Aldo Rossi, Leon Krier, and Michael Graves – who
intervened on the quadrants of Nolli’s plan whose etchings had been made by Piranesi – gave a number
of different interpretations of the landscape of ruins, transforming it into a personal theoretical landscape:
for Venturi the ruins are reduced to a billboard on Las Vegas’ Main Street – his fragment of Enlightenment
20
in the desert, according to Kenneth Frampton – and for Krier they are reduced to emblems, to icons. But
regarding Venturi’s proposal, as Reinhold Martin noted, the photograph of the Caesar’s Palace casino in
Las Vegas, pasted onto a facsimile of the Nolli map of Rome, gives a double message: the popularization
of classical iconography and the classicizing of popular culture. Martin provocatively wrote that “there can
be no Caesar’s Palace and, indeed, no ‘learning from Las Vegas’ without the earlier academic lessons
21
learned from Rome and its monuments”.

The proposal that least adheres to the exhibition’s premises and yet is probably the most founded,
despite its unconventional connections to the larger project, is Aldo Rossi’s. He does not accept Sartogo’s
instigation to intervene on one of Rome’s quadrants through a city plan, and he checkmates this idea by
deciding to plan only one building, that of the baths. His proposal is openly “indifferent to the relationship
with the city/or in particular with the city of Rome or of Roma Interrotta. Also because”, Rossi writes,
“every interruption presupposes a historical and psychological link that the authors cannot evaluate well in
22
any specific case”. His designs for the Ricostruzione delle Terme Antoniane e dell’antico Acquedotto
(Reconstruction of the Antonian Baths and of the ancient Aqueduct) propose three images of ruins at the
 362

same time: Piranesi’s archeological city, Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical city, and Gabriele Basilico’s
Rome, which relocates leftovers of the industrial age within the postmodern landscape. According to
Rossi, he collected the forms of some buildings freely “from other projects; others have been adapted,
23
and others still have decidedly been invented”. A few aspects of the plan are the fountain, the teahouse
with a promenade and a trampoline, the cabanas for changing or protection from the sun and, finally, the
“water house”. This last element, a celebration of the classification of the thermal systems, brings far
away springs, foreign to Rome and originating in the Swiss Alps, into Nolli’s plan. From the drawings of
the plan, the water house seems to act as the threshold, the conceptual entrance to the landscape of
ruins. But these remains are selected, transcended, and their meaning is amplified, like in Fellini’s
Satyricon (an adaptation of Petronius’ original), restoring the image of the city through the themes of the
irrational, the oneiric, the analogous.

Figure 5. Aldo Rossi with Max Bosshard, Gianni Braghieri, Arduino

Cantafora, Paul Katzberger, Ricostruzione delle Terme Antoniane e
dell'antico acquedotto con modernissime apparecchiature di
riscaldamento e refrigerazione ad uso dei nuovi impianti balneari per
svago, amore, e ginnastica, con annessi padiglioni in occasione di fiere e
mercati, Roma. (MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma.
Collezione MAXXI Architettura)

As if to say, a loud noise cannot awaken a sleeping beauty like Rome’s, which is tired of the current
ruckus and, having been trained in moderation, needs to be awoken calmly to the warmth of a pacified
vision of art, by architecture that renounces shouting excess in order to rediscover a sense of the classic.
The ruins of Rome themselves represent a timeless beauty, a beauty that has not been buried but, rather,
is only momentarily asleep, waiting to be rediscovered; a pure beauty, which has lost its firmitas and its
utilitas and is now only venustas. The Roman ruins lie, stretched out and naked, and they represent true
beauty, that of ancient Rome trapped in modern Rome, which moves us in its uncovered, fragile,
defenseless appearance.

What were the after-effects of “Roma Interrotta”? It seems relevant to cite at least one here. Peter
Eisenman did not participate in the initiative, but around ten years later Franco Purini did invite him to the
Roman leg of the exhibition “The Imagined Cities: A Trip Around Italy. Nine Projects for Nine Cities”.
Eisenman came up with a plan that perfectly aligned with the spirit of the project, a plan, we could say,

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pervaded by the syndrome of “Roma Interrotta” Focusing on the area around Via Flaminia and Piazza del
Popolo, Eisenman works on the concept of dislocation, which proposes a way of liberating Rome from the
repressions of place, time, and scale. In the explanation of his plan, Eisenman writes that he was
influenced by the text Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud asserted that, in mental life, nothing
that has been formed can be erased by memory, because it is saved in some way and in certain,
particular circumstances it can be brought to light. The father of psychoanalysis decides to verify this
assertion through a comparison with the history of the Eternal City: “Now let us, by a flight of imagination,
suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychic entity with a similarly long and copious past –
an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all
24
the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one”. Peter Eisenman’s vision
uses Freud’s famous passage as a jumping off point to imagine a Rome freed from relations and
meanings, made only of signs and figures that can be altered, superimposed, repeated, translated. An
imaginary and labyrinthine Rome, where Piazza del Popolo’s “trident” appears more than once, scaled
differently and rotated on itself; the part of Rome enclosed by the Aurelian Walls is also scaled differently
and dislocated; the empty spaces between city blocks are cross-sectioned and become abstract grids
that are then superimposed on the compact city. Through the use of different instruments – of scale
models – Peter Eisenman stages the obsession with possibility belonging to a form of writing that is
separate from the meaning of the very signs that constitute it.

Figure 6. Peter Eisenman, Proposal for Piazza Del Popolo, in “Le Città
Immaginate”, 1987. (Peter Eisenman archives, CCA Montreal)

“Now that language and dialect have died, Esperanto remains”, writes even Portoghesi. “Once the
channels of cultural continuity have been interrupted, retying the conversation between the ancient and
the new means going back to understanding the ancient’s profound structures: it’s a little like deciphering
25
a language without knowing its grammar or vocabulary; but it is the only possible way”. However, if
Portoghesi, despite his anguish for the present time, seems to provide a direction for the future, the letter
that Raphael addressed to Pope Leo X in 1519 leaves us speechless:

“Considerando delle reliquie che ancor si veggono delle ruine di Roma la divinità di quegli
animi antichi, non istimo fuor di ragione il credere che molte cose a noi paiano impossibili
che ad essi erano facilissime. Però, essendo io stato assai studioso di queste antiquità e
avendo posto non picciola cura in cercarle minutamente e misurarle con diligenza, e,
 364

leggendo i buoni autori, confrontare l'opere con le scritture, penso di aver conseguito
qualche notizia dell'architettura antica. Il che in un punto mi dà grandissimo piacere, per la
cognizione di cosa tanto eccellente, e grandissimo dolore, vedendo quasi il cadavere di
26
quella nobil patria, che è stata regina del mondo, così miseramente lacerato”.
[By considering the remains of the ruins of Rome that can still be seen, we see the divinity of
those ancient souls, and I don’t believe it to be unreasonable to believe that things that seem
impossible for us were easy for them. Therefore, since I have long studied these pieces of
antiquity, and since I have placed more than a little care in examining them minutely and
measuring them with diligence and, through reading the great authors, in comparing their
works of art with their writings, I think that I have achieved some understanding of ancient
architecture. Which on the one hand gives me great pleasure, in the knowledge of such an
excellent thing, and on the other great pain, in seeing, almost corpse-like, that noble
homeland, which had been queen of the world, so miserably torn.]

With this image of a “torn corpse” Raphael brings us back to the starting sonnet by Joaquim Du Bellay, by
reminding us of the inescapable defeat of every project for the city of Rome. Ultimately, what is left of
Rome in Rome, of the ancient in the contemporary? A chasm separates the two worlds, which can no
longer meet in the way they did in Freud’s vision, where he imagined Rome as a psychic entity. What is
Rome, then? The memory of Stendhal’s and Goethe’s walks in Moravia’s and Giorgio Montefoschi’s
novels? Or is Rome, by now, a mere surrogate, a decadent simulacrum of an image of eternity? Or, even
worse, a commercialized citation: a souvenir?

Dedicated to the “Sleeping Beauty”. The author investigated this subject during a visiting fellowship,
sponsored by a Fulbright grant, at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2016-17. The author
wishes to express her gratitude to Isabella Livorni, who translated this text and Erik Carver who revised it.
Also, many thanks to the professor Kenneth Frampton for his support, his generosity and for all the
conversations I had the opportunity to share with him in New York.

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Endnotes

1
Joachim Du Bellay, Les Antiquités de Rome, Paris: Federic Morel, 1558, sonnet V: Les Celle qui de son
chef les étoiles passait.
2
See Antony Vidler, “Architecture Dismembered”, The Architectural Uncanny, Cambridge,
Massachussets: The MIT Press, 1992, 69-84.
3
Aloïs Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin”, (partially transl. by Kurt W.
Forster and Diane Ghirardo in) Oppositions, n. 25, Fall 1982, pp. 21-51. Quoted in K. Michael Hays (ed.),
Oppositions Reader. Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 1973-1984,
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998, 621-650.
4
See Kurt W. Forster, “Monument/Memory and the Mortality of Architecture”, Oppositions, n. 25, Fall
1982, 2-19. Quoted in K. Michael Hays (ed.), Oppositions Reader. Selected Readings from a Journal for
Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 1973-1984, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998, 18-35.
5
Memory itself appears as a materialized concept. For Aristotle, memory was a contracted, synthetic,
and summarized imprint of the past, whereas in Proust’s Recherche it assumed the attributes of “the
immense building of memory” See the entry Memoria, in AA. VV., Enciclopedia Filosofica, Bompiani,
Torino 2006, vol. 7, 7236-39; G. Froio, La componente archeologica nel progetto moderno, Rubettino,
Soveria Mannelli 2013, 24-29.
6
Vittorio Gregotti, Il territorio dell’architettura, Feltrinelli, Roma 2008 (I ed. 1966), 72.
7
Gregotti, Il territorio dell’architettura, 61.
8
Arturo Farinelli (ed.), Johann Caspar Goethe, Viaggio in Italia (1740), Roma: Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1932-33.
9
See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, vol. 7 of the Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt am Main, 1970, 74.
10
Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 (I
ed. La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, 1979).
11
Fredric Jameson, Foreword in Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, op. cit., p. XX.
12
See Michel Carrouges, Les Machines Célibataires, Paris: Arcanes, 1954.
13
See Léa-Catherine Szacka, ‘Roma Interrotta’: Postmodern Rome as the Source of Fragmented
Narratives, in Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin (eds.), Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape,
London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013, 155-169.
14
Manfredo Tafuri, La Sfera e il Labirinto, Torino: Einaudi, 1980, 48.
15
Szacka, Roma Interrotta, 155-169.
16
Giulio Carlo Argan, Foreword, (1978), in Piero Sartogo (ed.), Roma interrotta: twelve interventions on
the Nolli's plan of Rome: in the MAXXI architettura collections, Monza: Johan & Levi Editore 2015, 23.
17
AA. VV., Le città immaginate: Un viaggio in Italia. Nove progetti per nove città, Electa-XVII Triennale,
Milano 1987. The section on the projects regarding the city of Rome was edited by Franco Purini.
18
Ludovico Quaroni, Carolina Vaccaro, Una timida proposta per Piazza Venezia, project description, in AA.
VV., Le città immaginate: Un viaggio in Italia. Nove progetti per nove città, Electa-XVII Triennale, Milano 1987.
19
Quaroni and Vaccaro, Piazza Venezia, 38.
20
See Kenneth Frampton, Storia dell’architettura moderna, Zanichelli, Bologna 1993 (I ediz. Modern
Architecture: a critical History, London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 343.
21
Reinhold Martin, Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010, XIX.
22
Aldo Rossi, Progetto: Ricostruzione delle Terme Antoniane e dell'antico Acquedotto con Modernissime
Apparecchiature di Riscaldamento e Refrigerazione ad Uso dei Nuovi Impianti Balneari per Svago,
Amore e Ginnastica, con Annessi Padiglioni in Occasione di Fiere e Mercati (project description), in Piero
Sartogo (ed.), Roma interrotta: twelve interventions on the Nolli's plan of Rome: in the MAXXI architettura
collections, Monza: Johan & Levi Editore 2015, 184.
23
Rossi, Progetto.
24
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, London: The Standard Edition, 1989 (I edit. 1930), I.
25
Paolo Portoghesi, Roma interrotta (project description), in Piero Sartogo (ed.), Roma interrotta: twelve interventions
on the Nolli's plan of Rome: in the MAXXI architettura collections, Monza: Johan & Levi Editore 2015, 100, 104.
26
Raffaello Sanzio, Baldassarre Castiglione (1519), Lettera di Raffaello D’Urbino a Papa Leone X. Di
nuovo posta in luce dal cavaliere Pietro Ercole Visconti, Roma: Tipografia delle Scienze, 1840.
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SAHANZ 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings