Uneternal City sets out to survey the overall theme implied by the 2008 Venice International Architecture Exhibition, by applying it to the metropolitan territory of what has always been considered the city par excellence. What is urban planning today? How is, and how can the contemporary city be transformed? But above all: on what does the quality of its inhabitants’ lives depend? On what does the quality of its public spaces depend? The quality of its meeting-places? In short, what can make our cities more liveable and attractive?

The section intends therefore to look at new means of transforming contemporary cities. It sets out in search of a different urbanism, which does not start from abstract planning on the drawingboard, but can grow and develop like a benevolent virus, to twist what already exists in unexpected ways: urban planning that can thrive on the life and energy inherent in urbanism itself. In this sense the evolution of the city and its structural spaces and form is not seen as a succession of static situations in time. Rather, it is considered as a dynamic and volatile condition that can bind together the economic pressures, the needs and desires of the people living in it. If its strength is attributed to the connections, and not to its drawbacks, this will bear out the theory whereby the essence of life lies in a comprehensive organisation and not in single molecules.

So, to reconsider the contemporary city on the basis of its connections means reversing the perspective of the centrality of architecture in the transformation of urban fabric and its functional concentrations, and focusing instead on the social relations and the vital movements of a metropolis. The projects examine the reality of Rome as a city, and the resulting visions must not necessarily be real or realisable. They are set for the most part in suburban areas, in the fuzzy spaces stranded between city and landscape; far from the historic centre and from the iconic image of the Eternal City.

Within this framework, each architectural office chose an area or a theme to tackle. None of the projects proposes global or all-embracing visions, but if anything, contagious and outspreading designs for operations still off the beaten track to exploit and represent new urban spaces and fabrics. Shapeless, in-between lands: where unauthorised housing alternates with urban voids, and remains of natural landscape interrupt dense physical and human tissues. Where social and spatial relations are unusual, indefinable or simply hard to place, the projects will capture the confused and vital mood of these areas, not in order to deny it, but to try to make it explicit and aware.

In this sense Uneternal City is stated as other than its historical antecedent. The projects drafted in 1978 in conjunction with the “Rome Interrupted” exhibition concentrated on the design of the historic city, by proposing utopian and elitist urban visions based on the form of the 18th-century city. Uneternal City, on the other hand, while starting from the same assumptions, proposes an altogether different interpretation – no longer associated with the fixity of the built city, but deeply interested in the transformation of the contemporary city and in its relation to history and memory. What is happening to the Eternal City? The image that emerges is that of a future- oriented Rome, where the architects open up new angles of observation of the landscape while altering reality through their own, often critical, sometimes enchanted, ideas and visions.

Subsequently, the action taken by the architects was joined by the efforts of seven international film directors. The latter were asked to open a window onto an ever-changing urban fabric, so as to capture for a few minutes a picture as mobile and elusive as mercury and which, precisely like mercury, is the most suitable medium for gauging the health of Rome as a body. With their brief stories and photograms, these movie directors point up the city’s complaints and potentials, spotlighting aspects and phenomena that have for a long time superimposed another Rome on the Eternal City. Uneternal City establishes a dialogue between artistic languages. It sets out to reveal the city’s hidden soul. So it does not look for it in the Eternal City, but in the Evolving City concealed beyond the Aurelian wall. The Rome hidden behind its buildings.