Rome: The Architecture of the City
Rome is a modern city that has been striving to balance between preserving its vivid historical artifacts and the increasing demands of urbanization. Both Aaron Betsky’s article- “Uneternal City” and Aldo Rossi’s book called “The Architecture of the City” give solutions to tackle this problem and instead adapt to tactical urban strategies to reuse spaces of the Roman Palimpsest. Betsky and Rossi have overlapping notions about design strategies related to infrastructure, landscape, form and function that characterize the urban architecture and layout of Rome throughout centuries
According to Betsky “Rome can no longer be planned” because it already has layers and layers of history, culture and architecture built one on top of the other. However, he does state that Rome still has potential to flourish in some way by being “tracked” and “traced”. He loves Rome for its chaos and encourages us to “find the chaos and celebrate it” by mapping and measuring through looking at patterns and systems to rearrange things. Mapping can help one understand the true essence behind the fabric of a city- which is what Betsky describes as a “collage of the past layers and possible future of Rome”. Betsky also hints at the possibility of “re-imagining” Rome by solely focusing on its peripheral areas with rich topography instead of the ‘eternal’ center full of “messy density”.
Rossi shares similar views to Betsky on how Rome’s central development has been driven and dictated by its natural topographic conditions on its peripheries by describing the Roman Forum as a “structure indebted to the terrain”. He also explains how the Roman Forum transformed from a market place to a crucial civic center of Rome. This transformation brings out the importance of how “Form is eternal” (Rossi). He suggests that the type(form) is more permanent and must remain unchanged whereas the function(use) can be variable in order to reuse the preexisting structures. Rossi was highly critical and opposed to the restoration plan of the Roman Forum, for it could’ve ruined the Forums quality. He urged to treat the precious urban artifacts as the Forum itself, with great care, to “not be considered as a sum of its architecture but as a total artifact”, to “no longer be perceived as a study of its single monuments but as an integrated research into the entire complex, to be respected “as a permanence like that of Rome”. Rossi did not want the Forum to have the same dismal fate as that of the Cologne Cathedral in Germany, which was built as a fake historical city and was a target of “brutal reconstruction of context/surroundings”. Rossi encouraged the return to the traditional city, reiterating the importance of the city as the locus of collective memories and urban artifacts. Similarly, the Basilica [a big rectangle building with a high roof and a semicircular apse] is used for speeches and meetings by the ancient Romans but as Christianity rises it is instead used as a courthouse, church, factory, etc.
With the rapid urbanization on this planet, we, as architects of the future, have a pressing need to reconsider the nature of urban fabric and the issues it puts forward. Both Betsky’s and Rossi’s notions give us rational urban strategies to further enhance the present conditions of already developed cities (like Rome) through adaptive reuse.
