Pasquale

^Pasquale

His family tree goes as far back as the devotional statuary of domestic atriums in Babylon and Thebes, made of wood with flecks of azurite and gold leaf, figures that would take excursions across the Mediterranean on unsteady boats, to Carthage and Tripoli where they were sold or swapped for clay vessels, full of fermented fish or the colour purple.

At some point a notion coalesced around these forebears. A conceit in which each one of them was an ultimately doomed, but nonetheless worthy attempt in miniature to reflect one aspect of an impossibly pure ideal. It was 'Beauty' that his forebears never managed to encapsulate, but regardless of this failure they were all so very, very beautiful.

The first marble members of his family cast midsummer shadows in the great colonnades at Palmyra, Apamea and Leptis magna, before they were reproduced, like for like, multiplied endlessly, and spread across identical marble forums from Saguntum to Artaxata. They stood like mirrors reflecting the sun off their blinding whiteness, endless duplications of themselves in an ultimate homage to the skill of the stonemason’s hand, so much harder to achieve than the caprices of novelty.

After the fall, one of this innumerable number eventually found themselves a lone survivor, unearthed from a pile of rubble somewhere and propped up in a Vatican garden to be lauded, worshipped, studied and adored as if he himself were the direct personification of all that beauty could ever be, and had ever been. The sculptor’s duplicate was so perfect in its fate that it usurped all its predecessors from which it had once been reproduced.

Slowly at first, one souvenir at a time, he began to multiply. Smaller versions, bronze versions, porcelain versions, eventually plastic versions of him in all sizes and varying levels of verisimilitude started to appear, initially all around the city he had found himself in, and then later elsewhere, in other cities, in other countries, all over the world, in living rooms, mantelpieces, on coffee tables, desks, windowsills and display cabinets.

At some point a notion coalesced around this particular forebear. A conceit in which his burgeoning progeny were all ultimately futile, and fundamentally worthless attempts in miniature to capture the qualities embodied in his original, authentic form. But nobody explained this to him, nor to his children, and while they may not have been exactly him, they were still so very, very beautiful to all those people who bought them, to their children and their parents, and to him.

^Pasquale

In photographs, black and white and colour and polaroid, Kodak and Fuji, and then digital bits and bytes the family grew into a nation. In colour, in photo albums, animated, through memes, on blogs, spread not only around the world’s living rooms but into every single person’s pocket, backlit, bright, photoshopped, zoomable, editable. In 3d. Poly-mesh surfaces which you could cut and stretch, and that were just like real marble. Apps in which you could make the nose bigger, bulk up the abs, rotate the head and then shoot it off to Amazon to print, for a package to arrive in three days with your very own idea of beauty in a little ball of bubble wrap. 

A notion soon formed that every single member of the family was worth as much as any other, as much as the ones who came before, and as much as the ones who would come after, and as much as those others who were printed, cast, carved, painted, rendered, and drawn at the same time. There was no such thing as an Ideal, and there never had been an Original. Beauty was simply the sum total of the pleasure experienced from all these innumerable items, and so the more of them there were, the more Beauty there was.

And so out they popped, fluorescent modified babies, in plastic and stone and metal and ceramic, each one slightly different, printed everywhere from Busan to Bilbao, and no longer trying to look as much as possible like that lonely statue in a Vatican garden. Each new object in fact trying to look as different as possible whilst still nonetheless containing the instantly recognisable trace of its origins.

Beauty increased exponentially, an unprecedented escalation of gorgeousness, and with every stage of explosive growth the prestige of their ancestors surged proportionately. The larger the family, the more collectively revered the progenitors. Gods don’t exist without believers, and the more believers there are, the greater the god, and so it is in the realm of objects.

It was at this point he woke up, proud heir to a lineage as august as any of the great aristocratic families. Pasquale. A bright, deep, luscious red. Electrically so. He is cold to the touch, and as someone comes over and flicks his side with a finger, he rings like a wine glass.

^Pasquale

He is unique, this Pasquale, and new, so shiny, shiny new, and yet he is enriched by the depths of a past he has inherited and of the breadth of a present his kind have conquered, of features he sports which speak not only of a Renaissance Garden and its star attraction, but of a hundred thousand display cabinets, a million Instagram accounts, the marble remains of a hundred Roman cities, the precise hands of a Greek sculptor, the pages of five hundred years of artist’s sketchbooks, the molten metal of the bronze caster, the click of a Canon’s shutter, and the mechanical whining of a 3d-printer.

Pasquale knows all of this. It is why he looks so serene.

..................................

This story refers to the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museums, his predecessors, and his many replicas.

All Colours Lead to Rome

^When Niccolò met Gianni and Pierluigi, and Ugo, and Pietro.

“Pompeian red: you are taken to a roman villa where lying men dressed in white peplum are served by young Egyptian slaves elaborate dishes, animals stuffed with animals stuffed with other animals, from the big ones to the small ones, and there is marble on the floor, outside the Mediterranean is blue but the walls of the room are red. That is all you see in a fraction when you hear Pompeian red.”

Nathalie Du Pasquier, Associations

Early Rome was a terracotta vase made from Red Ochre clay, like the Latin soil, like the walls of its buildings, like the background of its frescoes, with Yellow Ochre and Green Celadonite filling out squares and circles and any number of patterns, straight from the mud of the Lazian rivers and into the decorative schemes of ornamental objects, interiors, art. Figures were defined by black lines whose marks were made by the charred reductions of peripheral farmyard detritus, animal bones and discarded vegetation, not the accumulation of every other colour but the burning away of all life, a black nothingness for the depiction of anything. Egyptian blue glaze was like the eye of a northerner, or the sky at dusk, but boiled in a vat like a broth of minerals.

“Hours gave you gold for your flesh, excellent colours for the extremities of your limbs; (…) fortified your flesh with vermilion, so that you can live, so that you can live forever, so that you can grow younger, so that you can grow younger forever.“

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Rome came from red, and to red it will return.

"a world of statues that was reminiscent not of a trip to the British Museum today but rather of a colourful, interactive, hands‐on visit to Madame Tussauds."

Professor Mark Bradley, Colour and Meaning in the Ancient World

Numidian Yellow marbles, yellow Pavonazzetto from Phrygia, green Cipollino from Greece, purple Porphyry, pink granite, black basalt, Alabastro from Carthage, creamy Travertine from Tivoli, red veined Cottanello from Sabina. The buildings of the Forums in Rome were dazzlingly decked-out in multi-coloured marbles from the farthest reaches of the empire, just as much as its cosmopolitan crowd were dressed in every exotic attire that might be worn in any of the myriad nations whose lands laboured under the wealthy warmth of the imperial sun.

^Salvatore

Imperial colour was cosmopolitan.

“For colour is the material in , or rather of, painting, the irreducible component of representation that escapes the hegemony of language, the pure expressivity of a silent visibility that constitutes the image as such”

Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, P.4.

Vermilion, Ultramarine, Azurite, and Verdigris mixed into the brightest of bright pinks, pale blues, opalescent greens, limpid purples and bulbous reds that spread across acres and acres and acres of walls, ceilings, and canvases in palaces, churches, apartments, villas and monasteries across the city. Popes saw themselves as emperors and St Sebastian became the focus of a gaze not quite in line with what might have been considered that of a pious Christian’s. Michelangelo terminated the Sistine chapel in an awesome cascade of writhing nude figures, pinned to the blue plaster surface of the wall like a squirming taxonomy of artistic ingenuity. Raphael built a villa for a Cardinal that was to have rivalled the palace of Nero in its devotion to the senses and saturation by chromatic display.

‘According to Hebrew tradition, man’s first name, Adam, stands for “red” and “living”.’

Manlio Brusatin, The History of Colours

An indolently naked Adam reached out to a purply-red man-God in a twisting bed of golden figures, and as their fingers touched the renaissance burst like a firework across the drab spectacle of medieval Europe.

“…savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours; that animals are excited to rage by certain colours; that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. C. L. Eastlake, p. 55. (qtd. in Batchelor, David Chromophobia)

A whitewash descending over half of Europe. A darkness consisting of the brightest pigment. The renunciation of idolatry, the elevation of text, the installation of a suspicion that the power of pigment is too much for the unwitting worshipper whose autonomy is superseded by dumb awe. No more ceilings like the sky at night or the heavens in your most voluptuous dreams. No more saints in the grip of other-worldly ecstasy or rooms whose walls were gardens that between them contained green shoots from which grew carnal pleasures in abundance. The North paled.

Calvin and Luther conflated colour and Catholic corruption.

“In Egypt colors were considered to be signs indicating the “essence of things and not their appearance,” as witnessed by the Egyptian word for “Color,” which also meant “to be”. According to this thought colors had been separated from the divine body at the time of Creation and had been assigned to every population, to every animal, plant or mineral, to distinguish their peculiarities”

Lia Luzzato & Renata Pompas, Il Significato dei Colori nelle Civilta’ Antiche

Rome blushed, and carried on, only more so. A deep, rich, red, ornate proliferation of giant columns and stormy skies at sunset. The counter reformation saw a redoubling of the power of pigment and the exaltation of art. You no longer had to stand in front of a painting, they had grown so big that the whole building was now inside the depiction, the street outside, the entire city was a swirling vortex of putti, saints, martyrs, pediments, colonnades, chapels and staircases, rising up to a Catholic Trinity at the centre of which rested the golden poise of an all-consuming St Peter’s. A Roman riposte in marble and oil.

^Tancredi

Gold gilding, ruby red granite, brilliant white plaster angels, haloed light through yellow windows, Lapis Lazuli , Latin chants echoing within the sonorous smell of cloudy incense, an other-worldly rising up through embodied power, pigmentation and prayer.

"As white is the colour which reflects the greatest number of rays of light, and consequently is the most easily perceived, a beautiful body will, accordingly, be the more beautiful the whiter it is."

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art.

A whitewash of limpid young men in Carrara marble, Hellenic profiles standing one after another in the rustling gardens of aristocratic villas, inviting contemplation, implying a perfect and pure form of permanent youthfulness. Athletic affirmations of unattainable ideals, the bleached boys embodied an eroticism of elevated desires. Passions that were once hidden now openly minced down shady paths, loftily appreciating the pure white buttocks of ancient Apollos, Antinuous’, emperors, athletes, soldiers…

In the bedroom moving flesh tones and the undulating shadows of clean sheets, set against unadorned stucco work wrought with the classical rigidity of the most upstanding scholarship.

Winckelmann worshipped whiteness as a veil behind which he could hide all the shades of his prohibited pleasures.

^When Niccolò met Gianni and Pierluigi, and Ugo, and Pietro. Detail

“We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-coloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals”

F.T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto

The bourgeois march of a Rome bleeding with notaries, accountants and bureaucrats, stuffed with parliamentarians and insurance companies. Its buildings staid as the waiting rooms of family lawyers, coloured like the backs of filing cabinets, they filled the gardens and the parks and the pathways and the fields. Fords and Fiats thundered across Piazza Navona, and trains pumped in and out of the railway stations squeezing more and more people in between the facades, until there were so many apartments and crowds and cars and trams and buses and museums and offices, that the Futurist’s explosive whorls of electric energy were like being on the Via Nazionale and catching a glimpse of the whole city collapsing as it slid past on the curving chrome bonnet of a passing bus.

"[colour] works as an enzyme to catalyse chemical reactions, it generates nervous impulses that open new doors of logic in the brain, it is a sort of perceptive jogging, an aerobics for lazy or drowsy sensory cells. Like jogging it requires commitment, determination, measure, enthusiasm, faith, and patience, and to serve a purpose, it must be used well."

Barbara Radice, Memphis: Research, Experiences, Results, Failures and Successes of new design

The polychromy of the Renaissance returns like flowers growing through rubble left by the war. Televisions pulsating with coloured light. Piaggios buzzing about the place like tropical parrots. A florescent green Granita in a shiny translucent cup glinting in the sun on an Ostian beach. The rose curves of a Cadillac’s wings, the beaming orange of fizzy sodas, the pacific blue of the banquette seating in new restaurants. The city effloresces in pink and purple and yellow elevations that look like stacks of products on the shelves of neon-lit supermarkets. Shiny, loud, cheap, vibrant, plastic, mass-produced, new new new. Banana yellow Fiat 500s driven by women in loose, red cotton blouses. Balconies that zig zag, and curve in and out like Bernini designed them for a 1950s fashion house, and all covered in as many mosaics, ceramics and colourful make-up as you might find in the bathrooms and dressing tables and kitchens that they surrounded.

^When Niccolò met Gianni and Pierluigi, and Ugo, and Pietro. Detail

“If I think of spaces being saturated with colour, or just information, the space that comes to mind is the screens through which we access our internet.”

Andreas Angelidakis, The Colour of The Internet

The city’s new museum for the new art of the new century is steely grey, with squiggly highlights of black, its massive curving pipe-forms looking like they’re straining with all their tectonic might to return to the nineties, when grey was the universal soup of a triumphant but somewhat bored globalisation that just mixed everything together until it was all, well -grey. The young mothers take pictures of it on their phones, and as they post it to Instagram they add a filter, sepia or cool, or faded or greenish, they blur it, rotate it, up the contrast and increase its saturation, ripping it out of its textureless, colourless reality and blowing it apart so that it can float away on the breeze like confetti.

If you look up you’ll see them tumbling, and flowing in eddies together with the pieces of everything else that has been digitally detonated into a million glistening fragments, and just as the sun sets, when the swarming cloud is at its most luminous, you can glimpse shapes as it dives over the city, faces, buildings, neighbourhoods, histories, colours, the billion moments that have built Rome.

^Edgidio

Involution

If a spiral wraps the minaret and your dome’s inside a wheel, then turn them all together for some genuinely Augustan appeal.

Like a man watching you from behind a column, or people pushing in a queue, you can buy as many cornettos as you like, but you’ll never shake the deja-vu.

Arcade arches are the scenes of a storyboard whose movie circles the square, its plot is vague and its end is the beginning, like the loop of a repeating nightmare.

If a staircase wraps a sphere and your spire’s inside a screw, then turn them all together, for a touch of the Catholic world view.

Like getting caught in a demonstration, or being pick-pocketed during prayer, you can take as many artsy pictures as you like, but your loneliness will always feel unfair.

Red blistered walls are the symptoms of a disease, an itchy rash that gets under all the windows, like a clinging sense of unease.

If a colonnade wraps a spiral and your cone’s in an ellipse, then turn them all together for a display of Baroque kitsch.

Like an overcrowded platform, or electric candles in a church, you can rush all you like, but you know the historians got there first.

Tourists stare at piles of rubble like they contain the meaning of the world, and perhaps if they stared long enough, they would see how all great deeds unfurl.

If a spiral meets a circle on a rotating plate of gold, or an oval joins an ark in a tumbling ball of stone, and if you know just where to fold along the circumference of an intersected cone,

Then the red walls and travertine corridors will rise up,
in a vortex of geometry and dirt and stone,
that we so strangely try to encapsulate with the little name, Rome.

Stacks & Slices

“We want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.

Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.

To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?”

Taken from ‘The Futurist Manifesto’ 1909, F.T Marinetti

"For me 'the past' does not exist, because I consider that everything is simultaneous in our culture and similarly in judging architecture I do not see any fracture between ancient & modern."

Gio Ponti, Amate l'architettura, 1957

^Universita degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata Administrative Centre, the totemic Stack project, together with Calatrava's pools dominating the city's eastern suburbs 

“The past is no longer a burden. It is no longer an immense archive of untouchable and superior achievement that presses down on an unworthy present. It isn’t the dead weight of millennia that must be cast-off before anyone can be free enough to do anything. We no longer need to unburden ourselves of the knowledge that nothing we will ever do will ever compare to anything in the countless multitudes of past perfections.

Historians no longer have a monopoly on our history, they cannot continue to tell us where we come from, who we were and therefore what we are. They are not the guardians of a one and only unitary truth, or of sterile debates about fine distinctions in polite disagreements. They have lost their gatekeeper status, they were caught unawares, asleep on the job, their chickens have flown the coop.

Their libraries and primary sources and secondary sources and boxes of files, and opinions and finely framed debates have escaped, they have dispersed on the wind for any of us to catch. The old wise men are just old men now that anyone can share what they had always before kept locked up for themselves. Like the shrivelled and tiny Wizard of Oz behind his screen and the magician without his secrets, they are revealed to be the terrified little humans that they are once stripped of their magical hoard.

History is not in Museums any more either. The carefully crafted didactic order, the geographic hierarchies, the chronological sequencing, the derisory narrative summaries, it is all over. It has all run into the streets. It has all escaped into the ether, onto the internet, for our delectation, for our use, for our own ideas and madcap creations, it has run away from the convent and is discovering the joys of the world.

History is a lithe, liberated, vivacious young woman who is free to mingle with whomever she so wishes, is free to sleep with whoever tickles her fancy. She is lush and fertile and whimsical and serious and silly and capricious and profound and in turns she pirouettes between wanting to go to the Opera House, the Gallery and the Library, and other times the fetish club, the protest and the beach.

The entirety of the past is now as light as a smartphone, and as fun as a theatre’s wardrobe.

History belongs to us. Each of us. We can cut it up and put it back together in whatever manner we choose. It doesn’t belong to those who made it: they bequeathed it to us in the very act of dying. It definitely doesn’t belong to an Oxford Don, or in an ivory tower. It is our gift, it is our head start, it is what makes us uniquely twenty first century human, it means we do not need to begin each time from scratch, it means we have material with which to build our future.

History is our quarry. History is an ancient monument on our doorstep that is ripe for plunder. It is our Colosseum from which we get bricks and blocks and metal to put together our own churches. Only in this case the Colosseum isn’t diminished by our rapaciousness, it is nourished by it, it gets bigger every time something new is formed from its bones, it grows and fattens. Every stone we remove sows the seed for three more in its place.

Our acts of creation with the stuff of the past transforms the whole of history. We keep it alive. We keep it growing.  We save it from the Historians and the Museums. It is us who make sure that the most obscure medieval painter is as much a part of our lives as the latest dancing puppy video.

The past is out. The bible has been translated, published and distributed and we can all interpret it however we like. The priests be damned.

The past is now, and it is ours.”

Taken from ‘The Doge-storia Manifesto’, 2014 or ‘15, un-attributable collective

^detail of the stack in the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies Tower

As a designer, artist or architect in Rome, positioning oneself in relation to the past has always been of primary importance, its all-pervasive everywhereness sort of forcing the issue. Each successive generation hosts its own debate with its own set of positions expounded throughout the period in texts, works, academic positions and public commissions.

There are always the progressives and the reactionaries. Or as some would rather say there are the philistines and the civilised. Or perhaps it is always just a divide between those who are eager for dramatic change and those who favour continuity. Then again, maybe it’s the aesthetic manifestation of a perennial tension between those who have vested interests in keeping things as they are and those who don’t.

A consensus of sorts is normally achieved, a status quo, an equilibrium of mutual disagreements in which either party agrees to look the other way so long as any territory they have staked out is not infringed upon, clients are not stolen, sectors not entered into.

Things can however sometimes get a bit vicious. Occasionally civility and decorum break down, descending into petty recriminations, and a truce needs to be enforced.

As was well documented at the time in the pages of the quarterly journal “Estetica Epiche” (whose online archive I have been delving into), the controversy between the popularly labelled ‘Stacks’ & ‘Slices’ was not an amicable affair of respectfully disagreeing parties. It was more a playground turf war dressed up as academic debate, a mud-slinging affair in which both sides repeatedly accused each other of being the perfect embodiments of everything they considered wrong with society at large.

The whole drama was perhaps quite so nasty because the camps happened to be much closer to each other than had any previously arguing oppositional pair. The proximity made them mad. Although they would never admit it, they felt tarnished by association.

Both accepted the primacy of history. Both rejected abstraction. Both believed in continuity. Both used collage. They simply defined it differently. Very, very differently. In their texts anyway. To the amateur bystander the results were often interchangeable, the disagreements comic.

The ‘Stacks’ (known to themselves as “I Conservazionisti Ricostruttivi”) liked the history books, the museums, the grand narratives. Continuity for them was the reiteration of an epochal historic sequence, the elaboration through design of a series of sacred chronologies in which one thing led to another, which gave birth to the next thing and so on in a scientific enumeration of civilization’s progress through time.

They saw their job as the perpetual reiteration of moments within that great story, the re-construction in miniature of sections from within the eternal sequence which would function as didactic displays, educational reminders to the rushing commuter of our place in a formidable history, our rootedness in a proud past.

Each project became an opportunity to construct the layered historical strata of Rome anew, but this time more clearly, not just an incomprehensible crush of rubble, but a legible text in architecture, clearly legible to the average passer-by. Hence the stacking. Each project was to have a sequence, a set of styles, was to represent the progress from one period to the next. But clearly, with each era in its carefully allocated place, discrete and beautifully complete, with the relationships between these separate but neighbouring parts absolutely determined, absolutely set. Like in a Museum. Only stacked one on top of each other in piles, like layers of uncovered ruins.

^detail of the slice in the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies Tower

The ‘Slices’ (known amongst themselves as the “History Whores”) were directly inspired by the Doge-storia movimento, the manifesto of which I have partially appended above, and which sought to radically alter the way in which the past was dealt with by the progressive sector.

They were firmly in the camp of creatives who were of the belief that to not acknowledge the past, to reject it and attempt to start again each time with a clean slate, was only to be unwittingly ruled by unquestioned beliefs, habits and assumptions from that very past itself. To truly break free of the hegemony of history required a new kind of ownership of history itself.

Doge-storia were particularly influential and eloquent, but they were just one of many contemporary groups calling for history, for heritage, for the past to be disrupted, democratised, blown apart and reborn in the same way so many other sectors had been rendered completely unrecognisable since the advent of the digital era.

So the History Whores sliced, they diced, they wilfully upended, mirrored, flipped upside down, monstrously recombined at entirely incongruous scales the elements, the facades, the materials and languages of every single architectural style that could be found through a google image search. Sequence meant nothing, the overall effect, the juxtaposition of parts, the dynamism of contrasting and contradicting elements meant everything.

The Stacks were the Museum, the academy, row after row of orderly cabinets, while the Slices were the wild illogic and pure joy of a private collection, the plastic pig next to the roman fragment, they were the profuse abundance of over-stacked living room cabinets.

^elevation of the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies Tower

Both became highly successful. And they despised each other. To the point at which public competitions became unmanageable, or rather unbearable, for those organising them. Every decision was either overturned or disputed, endlessly, and if a commission was awarded, slander, personal denouncements, lies, sympathetic newspaper editors commandeered to discredit the individual members of each and every management committee, their names dragged through the mud.

There were two deaths in rapid succession. the murder of a prominent Slice and of a young Stack. They most probably had nothing to do with the controversy, and nothing was ever proven, but the atmosphere was so poisonous that everyone involved believed foul play.

Enough.

^Aerial view from the South of the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies tower on Piazza Venezia

As the general chaos began also to negatively affect a host of public procurement projects, from the new City Subway line to the new school program, the Mayor stepped in to force a resolution to what he saw as an utterly ludicrous situation. Their buildings looked so similar anyway, it was an absurdity that they could not work together.

Which meant that the Slices and Stacks were forced to work together. Always. On every single new public project in the City of Rome. Forced to work together, with neither running the show, instead with an engineer in charge making all the final calls. There was a rigidly imposed new code of conduct and set of procedures and criteria to follow for every stage in every project.

That was it. Controversy over. The fights could continue on the pages of ‘Estetica Epiche’ if they so desperately wanted to vent their accumulated bile, but not in the professional sphere.

The new protocols were worked out on the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies Tower that replaced the Palazzo in front of Piazza Venezia which was heavily damaged in the Latina earthquake and the subsequent tremors.

The tower effectively marked the end of both movements, with the explosive passions that had propelled an exciting period of formal innovation, rapidly simmering into a tepid bureaucratic approach in which the fundamental formal approaches were maintained, and half-heartedly incorporated into each project, but all the vivacity was lost, all the ideological fervour was extinguished. No more towering columns of historical literacy, nor vast, coruscating slabs of dynamically intersecting architectural epochs. Just a couple of things on top of each other here, a diagonal slice there. The exhausted iterations of mutual failure. The tower on Piazza Venezia, the token slice, the sad stack, whilst still not entirely devoid of interest, absolutely embodied all the failings of the generation of projects that were to follow.

^Aerial view from closer

The topping-out ceremony for the new Ministry building marked the resolution of a controversy (which had lasted little more than five years), the death of two ideologies, and the birth of an undead official style that dominated the city for the next decade and a half.

.......................................................

N,B. In case you hadn't realised this is a post based in Fiction.

References:

http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html Text of translation taken from James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics

Freud's Roman Slip

“Now, let us make the fantastic assumption that Rome is not a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long, rich past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent.”

Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents”

^Roman Rorschach 01

Rome is an artificial intelligence of the highest order, an ancient mind so vast no one writer or researcher has been able to comprehend any but the tiniest manifestation of its intelligence, anything but the most circumscribed, delimited moment in the awe inspiring depths of its oceanic memory.

It is a fathomless and traumatised intellect that has suffered at various moments in its life haemorrhage, stroke, dementia, concussion, it has had the most brutal and retrograde forms of surgery enacted upon it, trepanning and lobotomy, electro-shock and torture, but it has always recovered, rebuilt itself, re-connected whatever dots were left to hold on to a sense of self, radically altered as that may have been, again, and again, and again.

^Roman Rotate 01

Rome suffers the terrifying fate of the immortal who is destined to repeatedly outlive every individual and every era that he loves, who is doomed to remember even if only partially things he is desperate to forget, a consciousness fated to forever exist in a present that is only half as real as moments that burned themselves into its mind a thousand years ago.

It has seen, understood, experienced, lost, achieved and attempted so much that there isn’t the slightest trace of cynicism in its gaze. Everything is equal and not good nor bad, it all just is. Rome is tender towards the frivolous, fleeting, involved passions it is always encompassing. It can no longer judge anything or anyone, after having seen the failure and the success, the condemnation and celebration of each and every kind of whim imaginable. One moment an idea is lauded, the next it is deplored.

But the mind in its own way is also forever young. It cleans itself out occasionally. It sometimes forgets, briefly. It looks in envy at those whom it encloses with their beautiful illusions, their lightness, beliefs and certainties. There are moments at any age when each of us is swept up in some excitement and looks again to be in the full blush of youth.

^Roman Rotate 02

Rome is sometimes as delighted by new things as a child. It is sometimes as taken with new notions as a teenager who has been swept up in a holiday romance, falling in love like it has never happened before with temples, tombs, forums, basilicas, catacombs, monasteries, pilgrims, churches, villas, axes, factories, trains, ministries and parliaments, monuments, motorways, museums, tourists, subways, suburbs, airports, shopping centres, office parks…

It has a deep memory, yes, but its extraordinary capacity for reordering itself, for learning, for comprehending, digesting and even constructing the present is directly proportional to the depth of its past. Rome’s physical memory is also its processing power.

St Peter’s, the Vittoriano, Termini, the Basilica of Maxentius, the Aurelian walls, EUR, the villa Albani, these are all not only vast databanks of information-storage in stone and steel, they are also macro-processors, huge, unwieldy, but incomparably reliable machines that turn the past into pure computing power with which to manage the present. Rome brings to bear the entire vigour of its singular history, with all its accumulated knowledge and sensibilities, on every contemporary situation it faces. The past here is the antithesis of heritage; it is the very substance, the very means, the base material and energy of change itself.

"It is clearly pointless to spin out this fantasy any further: the result would be unimaginable, indeed absurd. If we wish to represent a historical sequence in spatial terms, we can do so only by juxtaposition in space, for the same space cannot accommodate two different things. Our attempt to do otherwise seems like an idle game"

Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents”

Freud’s supposedly absurd metaphor was more apt than anyone might have ever imagined.

^Roman Rorschach 02

“Having overcome the error of thinking that our frequent forgetfulness amounts to the destruction of the trace left by memory and therefore to an act of annihilation, we now tend towards the opposite presumption -- that, in mental life, nothing that has once taken shape can be lost, that everything is somehow preserved and can be retrieved under the right circumstances -- for instance, through a sufficiently long regression. Let us try to understand, with the help of an analogy from another field, what this presumption implies. As an example let us take the development of the Eternal City. Historians tell us that in the earliest times Rome was Roma quadrata, an enclosed settlement on the Palatine Hill. The next phase was the Septimontium, a union of the settlements on the separate hills. After this it was the city bounded by the Servian Wall, and still later, after all the vicissitudes of the republican and the early imperial age, the city that the emperor Aurelian enclosed within his walls. We will not pursue the further transformations undergone by the city, but we cannot help wondering what traces of these early stages can still be found by a modern visitor to Rome -- whom we will credit with the best historical and topographical knowledge. He will see Aurelian's wall virtually unchanged, save for a few gaps. Here and there he will find stretches of the Servian wall that have been revealed by excavations. Because he commands enough knowledge -- more than today's archaeologists -- to be able to trace the whole course of this wall and enter the outlines of Roma quadrata in a modern city plan . Of the buildings that once occupied this ancient framework he will find nothing, or only scant remains, for they no longer exist. An extensive knowledge of the Roman republic might at most enable him to say where the temples and public buildings of that period once stood. Their sites are now occupied by ruins -- not of the original buildings, but of various buildings that replaced them after they burnt down or were destroyed. One need hardly add that all these remnants of ancient Rome appear as scattered fragments in the jumble of the great city that has grown up in recent centuries, since the Renaissance. True, much of the old is still there, but buried under modern buildings. This is how the past survives in historic places like Rome.

Now, let us make the fantastic assumption that Rome is not a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long, rich past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent. For Rome this would mean that on the Palatine hill the imperial palaces and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus still rose to their original height, that the castle of San Angelo still bore on its battlements the fine statues that adorned it until the Gothic siege. Moreover, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus would once more stand on the site of the Palazzo Caffarelli, without there being any need to dismantle the latter structure, and indeed the temple would be seen not only in its later form, which it assumed during the imperial age, but also in its earliest, when it still had Etruscan elements and was decorated with terracotta antefixes. And where the Coliseo now stands we could admire the vanished Domus Aurea of Nero; on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the present Pantheon, bequeathed by Hadrian, but the original structure of M. Agrippa; indeed, occupying the same ground would be the church of Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it is built. And the observer would perhaps need only to shift his gaze or his position in order to see the one or the other.”

Extract from Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents”

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References:

Civilisation and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud, Kindle Edition

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Civilization-Its-Discontents-Sigmund-Freud-ebook/dp/B00D2ZZ6K4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416479049&sr=1-1&keywords=Civilization+and+Its+Discontents+kindle