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.
Uneternal city. Urbanism beyond Rome
The Venice Arsenale, Artiglierie. Curator Aaron Betsky
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- 11 September 2008