Good Friday

St. Chad's, Cheetham Hill: Interior

The Architectural Consequences of Anamnesis

April sees the publication of the latest volume in the Ashgate Studies in Architecture edited by Eamonn Canniffe MEMORIES OF CITIES: TRIPS AND MANIFESTOES by Jonathan Charley (Strathclyde University)

Memories Of Cities is a collection of overlapping essays that explore different ways of writing about the political and economic history of the built environment. Employing a variety of narrative forms including memoirs, letters, and diary entries, the essays are united in their critique of capitalist architectural and urban development and are illustrated by original photographs that form a parallel and supporting narrative. Rooted in the direct experience of living, working and visiting different places, the book investigates the dominant forces that underpin the capitalist nature of the built environment, whilst simultaneously highlighting some of the historic attempts to forge an alternative vision of how buildings and cities might be produced and experienced. Taken as a whole, Memories Of Cities takes us on what is a predominantly European journey that explores aspects of cities such as Glasgow, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Marseille. Drawing upon key authors and concepts to be found in both fiction and non-fiction, it encourages us to question how the built environment is produced and experienced.

Sir Alfred Brumwell Thomas (1868-1948): Stockport Town Hall 1908

The Portico Library: Interior

NEW Kindle Edition

My 2007 book Modern Architecture Through Case Studies 1945-1990 is now available in a Kindle Edition

Three Vicentine Shrines

The Architectural Consequences of 'The Little Way'

The next volume in the Ashgate Studies in Architecture(edited by Eamonn Canniffe)will be published shortly.

AN ARCHITECTURE OF INELOQUENCE: José Lluis Sert's Carmel de la Paix by J.K. Birksted Set on a hillside near Cluny, in a region associated with religious institutions and sacred architecture (including Le Corbusier's La Tourette), Le Carmel de la Paix, designed by Jose Luis Sert, remains tranquilly unvisited and quietly erased from architectural history. Why? This unusual convent falls outside the standard categories of Sert's architecture and has been overlooked in most publications about his work. As J.K. Birksted explains, the design and construction process for this building proved nightmarish, resulting in a building which, at first sight, appears to be 'ineloquent'. This first detailed examination of this building shows how the convent and the story of its creation offer valuable and important new insights into Sert, his architecture and his life. However, the study also opens up discussions on wider subjects such as the relationships between modernist architecture and ecclesiastical architecture. The design and construction of the Carmel de la Paix (1968-1972) followed the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (1962-1965), which introduced fundamental changes and proposals for renewing the relationship between the Church and the changing modern world and the convent provides an interesting illustration of this period. In addition, it offers insights into the fascinating world of the Carmelite order and its specific liturgical requirements, and, reflecting on the nuns' active involvement in the design and construction process, it also explores wider issues of women in architecture.

Urban Pattern

The Architectural Consequences of Play

This month another new book joins the Ashgate Studies in Architecture edited by Eamonn Canniffe THE ARCHITECTURES OF CHILDHOOD: Children, Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Postwar England by Roy Kozlovsky

Between 1935 and 1959, the architecture of childhood was at the centre of architectural discourse in a way that is unique in architectural history. Some of the seminal projects of the period, such as the Secondary Modern School at Hunstanton by Peter and Alison Smithson, Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation at Marseilles, or Aldo van Eyck's playgrounds and orphanage, were designed for children; At CIAM, architects utilized photographs of children to present their visions for reconstruction. The unprecedented visibility of the child to architectural discourse during the period of reconstruction is the starting point for this interdisciplinary study of modern architecture under welfare state patronage. Focusing mainly on England, this book examines a series of innovative buildings and environments developed for children, such as the adventure playground, the Hertfordshire school, the reformed children hospital, Brutalist housing estates, and New Towns. It studies the methods employed by architects, child experts and policy makers to survey, assess and administer the physiological, emotional and developmental needs of the 'user', the child. It identifies the new aesthetic and spatial order permeating the environments of childhood, based on endowing children with the agency and autonomy to create a self-regulating social order out of their own free will, while rendering their interiority and sociability observable and governable.By inserting the architectural object within a broader social and political context, The Architectures of Childhood situates post-war architecture within the welfare state's project of governing the self, which most intensively targeted the citizen in the making, the children. Yet the emphasis on the utilization of architecture as an instrument of power does not reduce it into a mere document of social policy, as the author uncovers the surplus of meaning and richness of experience invested in these environments at the historical moment when children represented values and ideas about life, community, happiness, human potentiality, and perhaps even the very prospect of imagining a more humane and secure future at the aftermath of the Second World War.

"the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness" (Part 2)

Rome has two voices, that of its (real or imagined) characters, and that of its buildings and spaces. These two voices converse and contradict each other in the narration of the city’s life. For both the citizen and the traveler they deafen with their clamour and seduce with their whispered charms. If one is fortunate to eavesdrop on their dialogue one is exposed to a heritage which is not a history and might not be a memory either, crossing the conventional boundaries of historical classification to connect to the imagined past and to the projected future. The phrase from Shelley's Adonais which provides the first part of this chapter’s title is a route into the concept of Rome as a palimpsest, (1) perhaps more immediately evocative in its four overlapping terms than Freud's famous analogy which compares the city to the human mind 'an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.' (2) Shelley's words suggest the different ways, surely many more than merely four, in which the physical fabric of the city might be read, above all the city which remains a fundamental locus of European culture. The pattern which can be deduced from Rome’s monuments, as forensic clues in some vast site of investigation, tie events across time to provide the matrix through which urban representation occurs. This chapter will explore the city through the narratives that have animated its spaces in fact and fiction, or in the grey zone that includes both those realities. Rome as image of the city is as pervasive as the image of Rome, and therefore the readings of Rome stand proxy for many of the manifestations of the contemporary urban condition, where a publicly confident assertion is given its resonance by the expression of an underlying private doubt. The duality within this phenomenon will be appropriated in the structure of what follows. In exploring the layers of the city, firstly the terms used by Shelley will be discussed as broad themes, and then specific cultural manifestations, three films and contemporary architecture will be observed through those themes. ‘Go thou to Rome’ The topography of the city of Rome exists as much in the imagination as it does in the geographic features of hills, valleys and river. (3) It was so in antiquity, with the locational specificity of the myths of the city's foundation, and it continues to be so today as it provides the backdrop to contemporary, literature and film. To know it one must join the long line of explorers and excavators who have surveyed the processes of urban existence lived in the ruins of the empire. One such character was James Douglass Kennedy (1845-96), textile manufacturer, retired Lancastrian militia captain and amateur scholar, whose uncatalogued archive of Roman research material survives at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. (4) Kennedy literally drew its contours in the 1890s, just at the point when modern Rome was coming into existence, copying out the geological features in a small water-coloured map pasted as an aide-memoire into a pocket guidebook he was planning to publish. He was no artist however. Perhaps sadly he was no great photographer either, but he was a prolific one, and among the roughly two thousand generally poor quality photographs he took between 1891 and 1896 on his grand tours of the city he unconsciously captured the changing cityscape. He accurately noted his attempt to capture the breach in the walls of Rome at the Porta Pia as being photographed at ‘11.40am 13 March 1891’, but mistakenly recorded the date of that significant geopolitical event ‘La Presa di Roma’ as having taken place on 29 September 1870, rather than 20 September. One hundred and forty years later, on 4 November 2010, a similar scene could be recorded, not at the Porta Pia itself, but at the Circus Maximus, and therefore featuring not the actual breach in the wall but a demountable set to restage this foundational act at regular intervals during a military display. This entirely contemporary expression of the festal tradition of the entry into the city, normally experienced at the Porta del Popolo and most famously employed for celebrated visitors such as Christina of Sweden in 1655, had a military echo in events such as the Sack in both 410 and 1527, the French occupation in 1798, and the Liberation of Rome in 1944. As an enduring national event around which legend accumulated 'La Presa di Roma’ became the subject of an early Italian film by Filoteo Alberini in 1905. (5) More than a century later it continues to be recreated by contemporary bersaglieri bursting through a pre-prepared breach in a paint and canvas wall. This simulation of an historical event is replayed to reinforce the national myth of unification, but taking as its subtext the metaphor of the city of Rome as the promised land to which a chosen people aspired. The artificially ‘natural’ silhouette of this ephemeral breach ties the structure, the event and its commemoration to those Roman monuments where nature is educated to be natural as a metaphor and manifestation of the paradise motif.

Urban and temporal artifice has a long Roman tradition and is especially exemplified in the urban language of the baroque. The bridging of the threshold between the immanant and transcendent worlds through statuary, as in Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain or in the extended sequences of urban architectural and painted spaces (by Pozzo and others) at Sant’ Ignazio still holds an allure. Its authenticity seems questionable to our age, with our obsessions with verifiabilty and actuality, but much of the physical fabric of the city plays with the acceptance of artificiality, no more dramatically than in the Trevi Fountain, where the millions of visitors it attracts every year are expected to believe that the Palazzo Poli is emerging from a fantastic outcrop inhabited by mythical creatures and featuring the torrent of water that pours from the rocks. Famously that artifice would itself be simulated for Fellini at Cinecitta for the close-ups in the seduction scene in La Dolce Vita, (6) adding new layers of contemporary myth. The figures that people the city's fountains share in their petrified gestures the wonderment of the visitors at the attempt to capture paradise in urban form, in its pilastered naves and halls and vast frescoed vaulted ceilings. One might perhaps detect the same architectural theme in Odile Decq’s recently completed MACRO, with its glazed canopy enfolding the sky in the space between the wings of the existing post-industrial buildings and roofing over the subterranean spaces excavated below street level.

The paradise A contemporary work such as Decq’s does not have the allegorical language of baroque examples, such as the elaborate façade and interior of confections like Santa Maria Maddalena. But the architect John Outram's mythopoeic and highly evocative reading of Rome as existing above the coils of the infernal python of Delphi (revealed after rain in the black wet basalt of sampietrini underfoot) and beneath the canopy of a great city-wide 'fresco bubble' gives the image of a sacred space into which ritual entry is afforded only to the elect. (7) The induction into a new realm finds its echoes in liminal experiences, expressed ritually in the sacred sphere through the periodic opening of the Porta Santa, and in its profane counterparts in examples such as the transgressive behaviour of Sylvia's bathing in the Trevi Fountain in 'La Dolce Vita' or Accattone's dive from the Ponte Sant' Angelo. (8) These crossings of a threshold in the city, be that the passage through the urban wall which defines a second civic realm, or ritualized arrival into a public space or entry into a basilica represents the taking on of a new role in the theatre of the city, reflected visually in the dramas of cinematic urbanism. But the scenographic monumentalisation of the traditional and the contemporary under fascism, manifested most deadeningly at EUR, seems most at odds with the contemporary world, unlike the temporal disjunctions evident in the images and descriptions of the pre-modern city. At EUR the aspirations to the ideal transform into a dystopian vision of funerary architecture, an urbanism of grave markers. The grave Rome’s long history as necropolis has ancient foundations, as was revealed by the discovery (in the excavations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the archaeologist Giacomo Boni) of the Sabine graveyard beneath the pavement of the Forum Romanum. (9) As an idea which is constantly being disinterred in Roman architecture, the contemporary equivalent of those graves are the sepulchral spaces of the museum. Associated with death through its Mussolinian proximity to the Mausoleum of Augustus, Richard Meier’s Museo dell’ Ara Pacis, reiterates that idea, although its steps and public spaces have been enthusiastically appropriated by Romans and visitors. Its fountain in a faint echo of ‘La Dolce Vita’ features in the hero’s benign bewilderment in the recent film ‘Gianni e le donne’. (10) The imperial city was dominated by the mausolea of Augustus and Hadrian, and landmarked by the columns of Trajan and Antoninus Pius. The christian city which followed it reconfigured this prevailing combination of death and city with the sites of martyrdom and burial of the early saints, commemorated by the great Constantinian basilicas. Some, of course, already featured their especially local phenomenon of the catacomb, the underground city, whether one reads them as labyrinths or covert monuments for an underground society. Contemporary funerary metaphors are perhaps associated with cinematic deaths - from those in the borgate such as Pina's in ‘Roma Citta Aperta’ to Accattone's death, to various spectacular deaths in the monumental setting of the centro storico in ‘Romanzo Criminale’. (11) While many cinematic characters have expressed the historical desire to 'take Rome' it is perhaps no more sharply represented than in that 2005 film where the gang, the banda della Magliana have their way with the city's underworld and are rewarded a series of violent deaths in significant locations, on the Spanish Steps, by the gazometro in Testaccio, or in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere where Libanese dies, like a sacrificed beast, facing the scene of paradise high up on the gable of the basilica. The metaphor of paradise (bound up with the urban image of the heavenly Jerusalem) finds its representation in the mosaic decoration of the facades and apses of basilicas, but more elliptically in the juxtaposition of graves and gates. The tomb of Eurysaces, a supremely confident expression of death attracted and was subsequently framed by the formidable presence of the Porta Maggiore, its heavily rusticated stones the very image of l’architecture assassine. (12) We are still in thrall to the image of the city as disseminated through the Grand Tour, through the sepulchral images of Piranesi, and the museological life of the contemporary city that resulted. The fragmentation and recombination which characterized Piranesi’s reading of Rome, discussed in Teresa Stoppani’s recent book, is expressed in his surviving architecture on the Aventine hill at Piazza Cavalieri di Malta, its military emblems tinged in pathos. (13) Those same elements were reconfigured by Valadier to punctuate the slope of the Pincian hill at Piazza del Popolo, the most physically potent liminal urban space, working as a threshold already from north to south and as result of his redesign additionally from east to west. The city The effect the duration of the city has is to turn symbols into metaphors for death, so the obelisk, an Egyptian totem for the sun's rays becames associated through the imperial cult with mausolea and the life beyond the grave. Then, a millennium and a half later, in its genuinely innovative Roman use as an urban marker, an obelisk’s presence turned every major urban space into a stage. In such an explicitly theatrical milieu the setting in ‘Romanzo Criminale’ of the death of Freddo, on the steps in Piazza Sant' Agostino, is only a very recent expression of the evocative location of the Roman way of death. A hundred and twenty years ago James Douglass Kennedy, too, was appreciative of the nuances with which such events could be interpreted. Among his own photographic collections he pasted a ‘Punch’ cartoon set recognisably in the valley floor of the Forum Romanum, in which a swooning American bride's feverish familiarity with bloody historical events fails to impress her clearly sceptical new husband. Evidence would suggest that these gender roles were reversed in the Kennedy household, where it was the captain who clearly suffered from a form of Stendahl syndrome, his wife content to gather ferns in the forum. Those ruins themselves are seen now by many hundreds of thousands more visitors a year than in 1891. Guides have continued to tell their stories, but perhaps without the emotive power which mass tourism abrades from sites of memory. The lamination of topography, antiquity and the contemporary is nowhere more easily visible than on the Capitoline hill. The piling up of the Tabularium beneath the Palazzo del Senatorio, the Arx beneath Santa Maria in Aracoeli and the Vittoriano, and the podium of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus beneath the Palazzo Caffarelli settle like a rich sediment of urban memory. The legacy of such layering in the realm of contemporary Roman architecture can be seen in the artificial topography created by Renzo Piano for the Auditorium di Roma. With an artificial saddle-backed brick hillside supporting three great archaic lead-clad temples, Piano created an underworld and an overworld of this increasingly popular city outside the city. Rome's capacity for the replication of ideal form carved out of the indistinct and dense matter of urban occupation is what continues to tie together the past and future cities of Rome. But as a city Rome is not only a necropolis. The narrow streets of the Campo Marzio or the broad avenues of the Esquiline are sites where the daily life of residents, of visitors and of immigrants floods over the archaeological sites and laps against the baroque outcrops of paired columns and undulating facades. Spaces which proclaimed the munificence and cultural patronage of generations of cardinal-nephews, adorned with obelisks and fountains, providing spatial relief in the densely sedimented urban fabric for social interaction, display and observation. Michael Herzfeld, in a recent study of Monti, refers to ‘the profusion of aesthetic styles and the palimpsest of broken rules that together constitute the historic centre of Rome’. (14) The contents of the city, its galleries, churches, and piazze are the cultural grave goods of an entire civilization, its marble and bronze, paint and light creating an inhabited tomb as vast as the city itself and centred on the architectural wildernesss of the Forum. The wilderness The image of the wilderness in Shelley's poem might be recalled in contemporary Rome by the zona archaeologica of the Forum Romanum which had inspired the romantic poet, but also by its strange echo in the apparently unplanned chaos of the periphery. The commonalities of the two situations are their incompleteness and disquieting depopulation, and the visual dominance of the massive scale of urban infrastructure either ancient or modern. But the state of suspension in which they exist is one where ruin can be read in two temporal directions, as a stage in the process of becoming as much as it is one of inevitable decay. These are the wildernesses which culture produces, the traces of thwarted ambition and display, and they invite exploration to comprehend the conflicting overlays of unfathomable complexity produced by time and urban amnesia. The epic scale of these fragments are then the objects that the urban explorer encounters in search of meaning in the environment. Such sought for meanings include the reading of the dense pattern of the city's form, the sinuous course of the Tiber, the seven hills shored up by layer upon layer of brick and travertine, contours of occupation and accumulation. What meaning can we detect from the contradictory clues thrown up through urban exploration? Inchaota Roma Forma Leonis was the ancient tag, invoked in the modern era in the pavement of the Foro Italico. In antiquity, against the gridded forms of Hellenistic and Etruscan cities and Roman colonial foundations the form of Rome itself appeared chaotic. The urban imagination of the ancient mind could see the organic form of the ancient city tied to its highly specific topography as replicating the form of a lion, the predator among cities. That augury of the city's shape was as potent an image traced on the earth as that seen in the sky by Romulus's sighting of the inaugural flight of birds at the city's foundation. But other corporeal urban images followed, not the least the enfolding arms of the mater ecclesia which Bernini expressed in the 1650s at Piazza San Pietro, embodying the church’s universal reach. These colonnades, marking by the sober rhythm of the unadorned columns are also the trunks of a stone forest lining the vast ellipse of the piazza, a clearing in the dense baroque city, an effect which was replicated most recently, and then controversially so, by Piacentini’s creation of Via della Conciliazione completed in 1950.

A similar excessive generosity of space is evident at Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI, perhaps also with an additional contemporary motif. The representational nature of that space, as an image of the fluid condition of the contemporary city, resurrects that tradition of abundance as a reliquary for the sacred objects of contemporary art. The resulting play on scale underscores the torus of space that is almost legible as a route through a city as much as it is a path through a building. The labyrinthine course of the gallery visitor, provoked as well by the bewildering confrontations of art, is an urban experience of appropriation and control as much as it is one of discovery. But an explorer, might have to take on the professional demeanour of the film-maker, the crime reporter, the archaeologist, the tour guide (or any other of the innumerable urban characters one might encounter in a city) to make sense of the city from its nucleus to its edges, making a transect across the patterns, narratives, monuments and spaces such as any urban explorer might discover. For example one might ask what patterns a secret service agent might discern? In ‘Romanzo Criminale’ the sinister headquarters is explicitly framed in the monumental centre of the city, overlooking the Forum, the Campidoglio and the Altare della Patria. Inaugurated in 1911 and dominated by a hollow embodiment of the symbolic founder of the unified state, this void at the literal centre of the city, as void as modernity itself, was echoed in the vacantly rhetorical mode of the planning of Roma Capitale, most sensuously achieved in Piazza del Esedra. Contemporary projects perhaps continue to sound that hollow echo, but the images that Shelley evoked exert their presence in recent creations and we can fold these readings back into the recent cultural architecture of Rome, (MACRO, Museo dell’ Ara Pacis, Auditorium di Roma, MAXXI) the fragments most recently added to the immense collection of urban spolia. Rome is not immune to the forces which transform other cities but the legendary duration of its bureaucratic inertia has much to provide help to those who wish to preserve the cities of the past. Occasional bursts of frantic activity are soon assimilated in a few decades into the pattern of the city. Change occurs but it is largely tentative in its approach and effects. The matrix of Shelley’s poetry gives us a framework on which to construct our own narratives of the city. Architecture and urbanism might appear determined and defined, constrained by function and economy, but it is often the product of the dreams and fantasies which lead to its realization, and eventually also reactions to that speculative and interpretative realm once construction is complete and it becomes animated by use. The eclectic nature of the Roman cityscape encourages the transhistorical connection between buildings of different dates and between different forms of expression painting, sculpture, ritual, architecture, film, and between the urban scenes which film captures. To take ‘La Dolce Vita’ in the first instance one can apply the four terms to the scenes of the film. Of course the encyclopaedic nature of the film might make this reading and many others easier to support. But one can at least define the Trevi fountain setting with its evocative use of the settecento urban theatre, the wonder it induces in Sylvia and the oneiric atmosphere of the scene generally as representing Rome (its nocturnal public spaces at least) as a ‘paradise’. The most sepulchral scene in the film, although only indirectly connected to death is the scene in the dimly lit church filmed in the recently completed church of the Martiri Canadesi where the Bach organ fugue played by Steiner with its doom-laden tone prefigures his later tragedy. The metropolis, in all its manifestations features in the film, but the scenes shot and set on the Via Veneto encapsulate the glamour of the modern ‘city’, juxtaposed explicitly and implicitly with the ancient context and surviving fragments. For the ‘wilderness’ the final scene on the beach and the encounter with the monster are obvious signifiers. Less explicitly, the desolation of the scenes set in the modern city, such as those at EUR indicate motifs of wilderness in another guise, reflected of course in the void at the core of Marcello’s existence. In the rather different social world portrayed by Pasolini in 'Accatone', the perhaps self-consciously poetic imagery employed (in a clear evolution of neo-realist forms of expression) can be even more easily fitted into the matrix of Shelley’s terms. They are however often multi-layered and subject to possible alternative interpretations. In terms of ‘paradise’, fleeting as it is, the Christ-like figure of Accattone framed by Bernini angels on the balustrade of the Ponte Sant’ Angelo represents a moment in which the anti-hero is transfigured into a spiritual being and a vision of the metaphysical is offered to his companions if they had but eyes to see it, but which the audience fortunately does. For the ‘grave’, the funeral dream sequence provides a formal image of Accatone’s immediate community as a society governed by certain traditions with the entrance into the city of the dead represented as an apotropaic image in Accattone’s dream. For the ‘city’, the quotidian city, we have the disjointed milieu of the anti-hero’s alienation; on Via Baccina in sight of the imperial fora, or in the modern grid of Testaccio where he dies amongst thieves. In this scene we have a type of Jerusalem portrayed but not a heavenly one, rather one with ambiguous echoes of the passion and death of Christ. Lastly the ‘wilderness’ is represented in the borgate, the peripheral districts, captured in a process of formation and offering the isolation of the modern apartment block rather than the age old communal life of the streets. The abandoned state of the public space in these new quarters with the frontier of development often visible on the skyline is, as with Marcello’s domestic situation in ‘La Dolce Vita’ a metaphor for the formlessness of contemporary urban existence, or at least for the abrupt disjunction between ideal and reality. In contrast in the accelerated and sensationalised milieu portrayed in ‘Romanzo Criminale’ the fragmentary appearance of moments which might be associated with Shelley’s terms has a more tentative character. Although the references might remain obscure the locations were a conscious selection on the part of the director to exploit the city in his film and therefore deserve consideration, even though there are often dissonances between setting and action. So the ‘paradise’ portrayed on the façade of Santa Maria in Trastevere in mosaic from the twelfth century has no direct connection to the dying gangster in the piazza below. It is, we might imagine, the last thing he sees as he dies, a simple enough image and, given the frequent occurrence of death in the film, the ‘grave’ is a constant all encompassing situation which the banda della Magliana and those unfortunate to encounter them are fully interred. The city of Rome is portrayed as a necropolis of monumental sites for death, and an anti-tourist image where chthonic forces emerge above ground to create a literally bewildering public realm, one where every façade or flight of steps or broader monumental cityscape might be a scenae frons for tragedy. ‘Romanzo Criminale’ therefore turns itself back both into the history of film in Rome providing a new set of images and echoes, but also into the broader tradition of urban theatricality, the dialogue between city and narrative in which drama is rooted.

‘The spirit though lamentest is not gone’ The city's capacity for reinterpretation and extension of its myth might be detected in its recent attempts to reposition itself as a global city. The decision from the mid 1990s onwards to update the city's image through the sort of cultural regeneration projects packaged under the term 'Bilbao Effect', had difficulty taking root in openly hostile soil, as the problematical building history of the Museo dell’ Ara Pacis proved. The Auditorium di Roma, MAXXI and MACRO, have all supplemented the effect of introducing contemporary architecture into the existing conservative urban fabric. In the case of the Auditorium and MAXXI, both located in Flaminio, the substantial complexes by Renzo Piano and Zaha Hadid respectively, conform to general forms of cultural regeneration, although with their assertive iconic forms they struggle to make connections to the somewhat featureless quarter in which they are located. In the case of MACRO, Odile Decq's project near the Porta Pia, contemporary art is the thematic content of the building and the new structure makes good use, if a little clumsily, of the existing brewery buildings. With a new glass roof between the two blocks, and the ramped extension inaugurated in the autumn of 2010, the complex has a humbler and more contingent form than Hadid's rather expensively made and vacantly sinuous ribbon-like spaces. The latter has proved difficult to sustain in the new era of austerity which has descended across Italy. However, to take the metaphor of the palimpsest as the guide to interpret this new layer of distinct cultural additions, one could argue that Hadid's gesture is one of complete erasure of the previous existence of the site, despite the maintenance of some of the existing military buildings. On the site of the Auditorium, during the construction process, the discovery of the archaeological remains of an ancient Roman villa required the repositioning of the proposed three concert halls. The past intruded somewhat unwelcomed into the present modern city, and was reluctantly and expensively accommodated. In the case of MACRO the morphology of the past dominates, the interventions by Decq being deceptive in their apparent modesty. The urban text is amended for the present in the sort of inventive recreation that suits the present chastened economic circumstances. Largely impervious to financial change, the fluctuating life of the city, trapped between the traditional cycle of an early start, the quiet of the long midday break and the extended time of the passeggiata, contrasts with the modern patterns of the standard working day, and the late rise and late nights of tourism. These cycles overlay the shifting shadows and sunlight of the urban labyrinth, and the prevailing gloom of the great public interiors. But the permanent effect on the physical fabric of the city is apparently negligible, a function of the unique size of the architectural elements from which it is built. The scale of the ancient city was emulated from the renaissance onwards, leading to much daily life being measured against the backdrop of the abstracted forms of plinths and column bases, with consequently a theatrical heroism deployed by the ruling order. In Paolo Sorrentino's film 'Il Divo' the depiction of Giulio Andreotti's night time stroll along the Via del Corso, in the protective embrace of his security detail questions the city's capacity for reinterpretation. (15) Andreotti observes the graffito denouncing him and Craxi, but is himself dwarfed by the immense scale of the rusticated base of the Palazzo Ruspoli to which his route clings headed towards the distant floodlit outcrop of the Vittoriano. The popolo romano with a weary gaze endure the dramas of their urban condition and the vanities of their rulers because as Shelley wrote ... .... 'tis nought That ages, empires, and religions there lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;’ (16) Notes 1 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Adonais (1821) stanza 49 2 Freud, Sigmund Civilization and its Discontents (Dover: New York 1974) pp 5-6 3 Rykwert, Joseph The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World (MIT Press: Cambridge Massachusetts 1976) 4 Canniffe, Eamonn ‘Blurred Observations: the Grand Tour of Captain James Douglass Kennedy 1891-96’ in Micheline Nilsen (ed.) Nineteenth-Century Photographs and Architecture – Documenting History, Charting Progress and Exploring the World (Ashgate: Farnham 2013) 5 Di Biagi, Flaminio Il Cinema a Roma: Guida alla storia e ai luoghi del cinema nella capitale (Palombi: Roma 2003) pp 148-150 6 Fellini, Federico ‘La Dolce Vita’ (1960) 7 Outram, John ‘My Kind of Town: Rome’ Architecture Today No.11 8 Pasolini, Pier Paolo ‘Accattone’ (1961) 9 Rossi, Aldo The Architecture of the City (MIT Press: Cambridge Massachusetts 1982) p 119 10 Di Gregorio, Gianni ‘Gianni e le donne’ (2011) 11 Rossellini, Roberto ‘Roma Citta Aperta’ (1945); Placido, Michele ‘Romanzo Criminale’ (2005) 12 Coates-Stephens, Robert Porta Maggiore - Monument and Landscape: Archaeology and Topography of the Southern Esquiline from the Late Republican Period to the Present (L’Erma di Bretschneider: Rome 2004) 13 Stoppani, Teresa Paradigm Islands – Manhattan and Venice: Discourses on Architecture and the City (Routledge: London 2010) 14 Herzfeld, Michael Evicted from Eternity: the restructuring of Modern Rome (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2009) p 94 15 Sorrentino, Paolo ‘Il Divo: La spettacolore vita di Giulio Andreotti’ (2008) 16 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Adonais (1821) stanza 48 BIBLIOGRAPHY Bosworth, R.J.B. Whispering City: Rome and Its Histories (Yale University Press: New Haven and London 2011) Canniffe, Eamonn ‘Blurred Observations: the Grand Tour of Captain James Douglass Kennedy 1891-96’ in Micheline Nilsen (ed.) Nineteenth-Century Photographs and Architecture – Documenting History, Charting Progress and Exploring the World (Ashgate: Farnham 2013) Coates-Stephens, Robert Porta Maggiore - Monument and Landscape: Archaeology and Topography of the Southern Esquiline from the Late Republican Period to the Present (L’Erma di Bretschneider: Rome 2004) Di Biagi, Flaminio Il Cinema a Roma: Guida alla storia e ai luoghi del cinema nella capitale (Palombi: Roma 2003) Freud, Sigmund Civilization and its Discontents (Dover: New York 1974) Glorney Bolton, J.R. Roman Century 1870-1970 (Hamish Hamilton: London 1970) Hare, Augustus J.C. 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