Public Realm in Rome Fall Semester 2016/17 MSc3 Theory Seminars Research submission: Papal Arsenal, Rome; Reading the site as a human condition. Kristina Kupstaite Student no.: 4361717 Submission date: 13th January Papal Arsenal, Rome; Reading the site as a To begin a discourse on the effect the built human condition. environment within cities has on its inhabitants, it is imperative to provide a brief overview of the evolution of the city as a Introduction product of civilization. At this stage, we shall delineate three stages of city development: This paper will attempt to discover a The Medieval City, The Renaissance City, and theoretical approach to the understanding, The Modern City. analysis, and eventual proposal for the site- specific task. The site is located in the The Medieval City – cities were not metropolitan city of Rome, Italy. It is a former planned, they developed where they Papal Arsenal, long since abandoned, and were needed; they grew and refined named as an ‘interstice’ within the city. Within organically over long periods. the premise of the assignment the proposal is ‘…because this slow process concerned with the ‘public institution’ or permitted continual adjustment and ‘public space’; therefore, the task at hand is to adaptation of the physical give a new lease of life to the site and return it environment to the city functions. The to the context of the city. city was not a goal in itself, but a tool formed by use.’ i the cities were based To start this paper, it is important to on the experience and needs of the understand the meaning of the city, especially inhabitants and built by the as we shall be focussing on the public domain. inhabitants. Two aspects go hand in hand when imagining The Renaissance City. A drastic the city; firstly, the city is a ‘jungle’ of brick and change in the city development mortar – this evokes the sense of the built occurred from the 1400s. The environment; secondly – the city is a vast transition from what is called, ‘the agglomeration of human activity – it’s organic city’ to ‘the planned city’. The inhabitants create the city – literally and concern moved from the primary figuratively. There is a continual coexistence functions of the buildings and the and collaboration between the built areas between them (which environment and its inhabitants, each side accommodate human activity); ‘the assisting in determining the trajectory of the space’, to the ‘spatial effect’ – a focus others’ development – they influence each on the representation of power and other. Since the city is a product of human the visual effect this had on cities. The activity, it is clear, that we (with varying street becomes a ‘theatrical degrees of direct impact) influence our machine’ii. surroundings; however, it may not be The Modern City. The second change immediately obvious the effect that the built took place in the early 20th century, it environment has on human activity or on the occurred as an antidote to the human condition, or whether this effect would deteriorating physical environment be improving, accommodating, or and demographic growth explosion of deteriorating. This paper shall initially western cities in the late 19th investigate the extent to which the built Centuryiii. A rational and scientific environment can affect us, these findings shall approach to city development was be used to initiate a theoretical argument for created, which was highly influenced the approach the builders of the city may by the ideologies of the follow in order to accommodate the dweller, Enlightenment (1800-1900s). The city finally it shall attempt to the apply the theory no longer came to be through to the site-specific condition. natural/temporal accumulation, Individuals are sensorial, experiential, and instead there was attention to social beings who require external stimulus aesthetics; with picturesque, and contact with others, whether this be direct geometric purification, ahistoricism (meeting, playing) or indirect (hearing, and elimination of the disorder in the seeing). It may be argued that the essential cityiv. This resulted in a fragmentation aspect of the city is those social acts which and ‘the separation and exclusion of take place between or around the built elements’; a ‘separati[on] of environment, therefore the physical architecture from the experience of framework of the city can have a great life and the needs of society’v although influence on the accommodation of this act. It most of the utopian and post-war then becomes requisite that the city should megalomaniacal proposals were not provide for the possibilities of meeting, realised, their development and the greeting, seeing and hearing. However, it does ideologies behind them have not mean that there is a direct drastically scarred and disfigured the interrelationship between the aesthetics (or cities, with this process continuing to ‘beauty’) of the built environment and the the present day. Ready-made ‘instant activity within and between it, rather the cities’ are constantly developed. overall construction of the space which accommodates the activity might be ‘The social democratic utopia did indeed allow perceived as the key aspect. scope for consumer-orientated approach and increasingly diverse architectural forms, but Aldo Rossi in the book ‘The Architecture of the urban design as a whole remains large-scale, city’ attempts to redefine the relationship mono-functional and inflexible. As a result of between object and subject. The Object being this, the role of the urban user was singularly the city (and/or architecture), the Subject limited to consumer of everyday products’vi being the inhabitant. Aldo Rossi’s notion is that if the collective memory of the society is From this we may infer that throughout the the city itself, then it follows that the city is ages, from the medieval city to the present collective memoryviii. Consequently, we day, the preoccupation of semiotics and the should attempt to reintegrate the subject and expression of power through the built object into the discourse of architecture – an environment has reduced the role of the idea apparently in opposition to the approach inhabitant from that of active user and a of modernism, which implicitly rejected the producer of the space to that of passive subject. Therefore, if we agree with Aldo Rossi observer. The individual is stripped of their that the city is a mutual coexistence between physical, emotional, sensual, and productive the object and the subject, and that the qualities in the discourse of architecture and subject is one of the primary components of has become instead viewed purely as an the city metabolism; then it is important to inanimate object that must be contained and notice that the human being is a sensorial, controlled by its environment – the city. This evolving being with innate unconscious results in potentially visually attractive (but yearning for participation (interaction, empty), unpolluted spaces, but, perhaps only synergy) irrespective of if this is with animate as it is used purely as a transitional space. or inanimate entities. Thus, cognition, Jan Gehl observes that there are three types of perception and existentialism cannot be activities: necessary, optional, and social.vii erased from the lexicon of architecture and The latter two are the concern of this paper, instead can act as a driver for the ‘other’ since those activities mostly depend on the approach to the development of the city – physical quality of the external spaces. seeing the city at the eye level view. Which may lead to the more accommodating phenomenological approach to architectural environments for the human condition, ‘that research and design – architecture/the city is stimulate spontaneous interaction in daily read not through the morpho-typological comings and goings’, promotes development perspective (the form), but rather through of common values and stipulates the resilience how they are perceived and experienced – the and confidence in city user.ix The following spaces in between. chapters of this paper will discuss the Moving from semiotics to phenomenology ‘Form matters, but more for what it can do architecture being Incomplete; Network like than for what it looks like.’x (Stan Allen), Equivocal (Robert Venturi), Spontaneus, Ambiguous (Hrhahn Urban As has already been discovered, the semiotic design) and many others. approach of the 20th century (and, to some extent, the present) has disregarded the Thus, the architectural vocabulary can be subject as well as the pre-existing conditions, changed: radically calmed meaning of representation From: To: and disregarded the instrumentality of architecture in everyday life. This results in Plastic Infrastructural problems in the cities at the local scale, the streets no longer form places where everyday Formal Operational life can take place. Or as Stan Allen states: Representational Performative ‘… an architecture that works exclusively in the Fragmented Continual/Connected semiotic register and defines its role as a critique, commentary, or even The phenomenological approach to ‘interrogation’… has given up on the architecture have been already explored by a possibility of ever intervening in [the] reality’xi. numerous practising architects and theorists such as August Choisy in his investigation on Therefore, it is an opportunity to look at the the acropolis in Athens as early as the human condition as a generator of a different nineteenth century. More recently, architects