Rome (re)Interrupted

Being the first of this year's (Summer 2015) group to post, I am giving myself the honor of introducing to everyone interested our Studio Project.

As background, an architect/urban planner/artist/surveyor named Giovanni Battista Noli completed his commissioned plan of Rome in 1748, showing in great detail the character and size of Rome up to that point. His method of pairing dense poche paired with very selective 'open air' plans of more important civic spaces gave the viewer a greater understanding of how the city functioned at an urban scale; how it breathed.

Fast forward several hundred years to 1978. A group of prominent architects are brought together for a new, interesting and exciting architectural exercise, the result of which is to be exhibited in a gallery. The task: re-imagine the 12 panels of Noli's plan and redesign the urban fabric of contemporary Rome as if all the building between 1748 and 1978 had never been done. The purpose was to shed light on the ways in which urban design and city planning were falling short by providing a theoretical look at what could have been. The result: Roma Interrotta. Rome Interrupted.

One of the 12 participants in particular, Colin Rowe, went above and beyond the call-of-duty in his assignment. Fresh off of the publishing of his work Collage City, Colin Rowe worked by translating ,in an intensely loyal way, the language of Nolli's graphic style to his vision of contemporary Rome through the lens of what he termed Contextuallism. To Rowe, Contextuallism meant understanding, in a very intimate way, the history and methods by which Rome had built upon itself for centuries. Rather than just blowing 'rational' streets through centuries of densely packed architectural treasures, he wanted to design with the  idea that Rome was not built in a day in mind.

Our task for this Summer, is to do what the 12 architects of Roma Interrotta were asked to do (albeit at a much smaller scale). Using both Nolli's graphic language and the existing site in Rome, we are to re-imagine it through our interpretation of Colin Rowe's Contextualism. The assignment is difficult; putting us into the role of Urban Designers in an intensely foreign environment to the American (read: grid oriented) mind, but with out a doubt, a worthwhile one.

Following the link below redirects to an image gallery which I have compiled showing the panels (all that I could scrounge) of both the Nolli Plan and the Roma Interrotta panels.

http://imgur.com/a/38rqF

Cheers and happy reading,

Alex