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Alex McCargar RISD Architecture Degree Project Work

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Alex McCargar B.Arch 2011 Degree Project Work, Rhode Island School of Design

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“IT HAD BEEN AN INTERVAL LASTING THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF TIME, NEITHER MORE NOR LESS, A HUMAN ENCOUNTER, NOT UNPLEASANT (THE LADY WAS POLITE, DISCREET, UNASSUMING) PRECISELY BECAUSE IT WAS BARELY ADUMBRATED. IN THE BOOK HE NOW FOUND A FAR FULLER AND MORE CONCRETE ATTACHMENT TO REALITY, WHERE EVERYTHING HAD A MEANING, AN IMPORTANCE, A RHYTHM.” (CALVINO)

Presented in partial fulfi llment of the requirements for Bachelor of Architecture in the Department of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design.

ALEXANDER L. B. MCCARGAR

B.ARCH 2011, BFA 2010

apporved by:

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This book IS THE FINAL ITERATION FROM A SERIES OF PROCESS BOOKS MADE IN CONJUNCTION WITH AND IN PREPARATION FOR THE DEGREE PROJECT REVIEW OF Alexander L. B. McCargarHELD AT THE Woods-Gerry Gallery AT Rhode Island School of Design ON MAY 22ND 2011. THIS EDITION CONTAINS ALL WORK MADE UP UNTIL THE REVIEW.

EVERY IMAGE, CLIPPING, PHOTO, WRITING, SKETCH, SCAN, IS THE PROJECT AND HAS BEEN INTEGRAL TO THE FORMATION OF THE PROJECT.

THIS BOOK DOES NOT REPRESENT CLOSURE OF THE PROJECT.

[email protected]

THIS COPY, NUMBER __________ OF __________.

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CONTRADICTIONS 6

STATEMENT 7

DE- /CONSTRUCTION: PERCEPTIONS, INTERACTIONS AND RUINS 14

CALVINO: BETWEEN THE CHARACTERS 20 ANDREA DELITIO: VALUE OF UNCERTAINTY- IMPLICATION OF IMAGINATION 28 ART SPACE 36 CHAIR (S) 46 THE CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM 56

THE WORK IN THE LIVING ROOM 66 AGE IS NOT MANUFACTURABLE 70

UNDERSTANDING OF PLACE 72

Contents

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THE ROMAN FORUM AND THE TEMPLE OF SATURN 98

BIBLIOGRAPHY 156

INDEX 158

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THE PROJECT IS BASED ON THREE CONTRADICTIONS:

It is a museum without galleries or a collection

It preserves its site by slicing through it and building on top of it

It is designed for the unplanned, spontaneous, and unpredicted interactions of its inhabitants

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The institution of the museum is disintegrating. In the last quarter century, it has attempted to leave it’s own walls, to generate activity over passivity, but while doing this it has not been able to let go of the white walls it attempts to leave. The contemporary museum has no collection and no galleries. The first of three contradictions. While it shifts to acknowledge a global culture connected through the digital realm, it also necessitates a deeper connection to physical site when the neutrality of its white box galleries is rejected. It can not ignore where it is. The visitors’ interactions with one another and with place, become art.

Sited within the Roman Forum, the project re-establishes a line of inhabitation discarded when the ruins were “preserved” and made a spectacle. Their existence in a simultaneous state of construction and deconstruction is re-achieved and maintained. The “new” aims to preserve what exists, but still allows disintegration and imagination. Preservation is a continued growth and further decay, not a freezing. This relationship establishes the second contradiction propelling the project to continuously establish and invalidate itself.

With no galleries or storage facilities, the museum becomes a series of living and working spaces. Hotel rooms for the visitor, studios for the artist, offices for curators and shop for the conservator. Each is woven into a new set of relationships that can not be accurately predicted and thus not entirely designed for, setting up the third contradiction.

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"OVERLAPPING RATHER THAN SEPARATED, FUNCTIONS INHABIT HYBRID BUILDING FORMS. THE RELATION BETWEEN THINGS IS THE FOCUS, RATHER THAN THE OBJECT TYPE." (HOLL, 13)

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“HE LAY ON ONE SIDE, HOLDING THE BOOK SO THAT IT BLOCKED THE SIGHT OF HER, BUT IT WAS AWKWARD TO KEEP HIS ARM AT THAT HEIGHT, AND IN THE END HE LOWERED IT. NOW, EVERY TIME HE HAD TO START A NEW LINE, THE SAME GAZE THAT RAN ALONG THE LINES ENCOUNTERED, JUST BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE PAGE, THE LEGS OF THE SOLITARY VACATIONER.”(CALVINO, 260)

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The built environment is composed of sensory experiences which put into play a series of interactions and voyeurisms. These interactions and voyeurisms lead to the construction of invented pasts and speculated futures. Each of these constructions is hinged on uncertainty which thus activates our imagination. The aspect of uncertainty allows for any insertion, prediction, speculation and thus an infinite of possibilities. This fragmentary nature of our perceptions and their resulting constructions is paralleled in ruins. Ruins exist in a simultaneous state of construction and deconstruction. Like anything old, we can create a story behind the object or architecture, but in ruins we are forced to not only invent the narrative, but to fill in the physical as well. A rough sketch works in a way that when we see multiple lines delineating a subject, our mind fills in or averages out and we perceive something believable. In a ruin, those multiple lines not only exist, but some or all are invisible or have vanished.

The project is a filling in, taking out, speculating and inventing. Things are realized or created through deconstruction and taken apart through construction. In this way, view or angle of perception becomes acknowledged and crucial.

A series of initial projects or studies allowed me to explore these ideas and work in multiple scales and different materials. Each one flowed into the next and each began to wrap back around the others.

De-/Construction

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CALVINO: BETWEEN THE CHARACTERS

ANDREA DELITIO: VALUE OF UNCERTAINTY- IMPLICATION OF IMAGINATION

CHAIR (S)

SPACE FOR/FROM ART: THE SELF, THE OTHER

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Leonardo da Vinci Rearing Horse, c. 1504

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Paestum 550-525 BCE

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Alberto GiacomettiUntitled (Illustration 56), 1969

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Edouard Baldus Roman Tower near Nimes, 1853

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CALVINO: BETWEEN THE CHARACTERS

The space is inhabited by two characters, the boy reader Amedeo, and the vacationing woman. It is created for them, but does not exist without them. The space is an armature, propelling, documenting and causing acts of voyeurism. There is a naiveness in that most acts of looking at the other occur due to a discovery, an accident, a curiosity found within the space. The problem with this project, is that there is no way for you and me to enter. We will always be watching from above, afar. Whereas in Calvino’s story, The Adventure of a Reader, from which the characters originate, we the reader, reading the story, become Amedeo the reader, reading his book. We also become Amedeo the non-reader as the reality of his book becomes intertwined with the reality outside his book. In Calvino’s story, In the moments when we become Amedeo we are simultaneously inhabiting the space and looking at it from afar. We are in it, unaware of ourselves observing it. We become the other.

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“Amedeo didn’t know whether

to look at her,

pretending to read, or to read,

pretending to look at her. He was interested in the one thing and the other,

but looking at her seemed too indiscreet,

while going on reading seemed too

indifferent.”

Calvino, 270

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“RIGHT FROM WHEN I WAS A CHILD,

EVERY TIME I DREW CLOSE TO HIM WITH AFFECTION,

AT A CERTAIN POINT I WOULD FEEL HIS PROFESSIONAL DIGNITY COMING BETWEEN US LIKE A UNBREAKABLE SHEET OF GLASS WHICH MIGHT, PERHAPS, PERMIT ME TO ADMIRE HIM, BUT NOT TO LOVE HIM.” (MORAVIA, 8)

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DELITIO: VALUE OF UNCERTAINTY AND IMPLEMENTATION OF IMAGINATION

Andrea Delitio painted the Marriage at Cana around 1470. It is a fresco in the Atri Cathedral in the Abruzzo region of Italy. I have not seen it, so I still have no perception of it’s size. My understanding is limited to the various images on my screen and the printed page.

Dissecting the image, the plan can be reconstructed, based on any assumption. If the tiles on the floor make a grid of perfect squares then the station point is many feet behind and to the left instead of directly in front of the scene. If the station point is assumed in front, middle of the scene, then the tiles on the floor make an array of acutely and oddly shaped individual pieces, etc, etc.

There are an infinite of possibilities concerning perception, interpretation and imagination.

Finally, multiple modes of representing are merged. Anomalies arise at the intersections of different representations.

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Contraption for the elimination of peripheral vision

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“UNCONSCIOUS

TRANSFORMS RETINAL GESTALT

INTO SPATIAL AND BODILY EXPERIENCES.

PERIPHERAL VISION INTEGRATES

US

WITH

SPACE,

WHILE FOCUSED VISION PUSHES US OUT OF THE SPACE,

MAKING US MERE SPECTATORS.”

PERIPHERALPERCEPTION

(PALLASMAA, 13)

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ART SPACE: CADMUS, SCHIELE, BACON, ANTINOUS

In the works of Paul Cadmus, Francis Bacon, Egon Schiele and the depiction of Hadrian’s Antinous we see a fracturing, fragmenting, dissecting in order to understand the self or the Other. There is a deconstruction which occurs in the construction of an image and an understanding.Cadmus freezes a moment of intimacy and at the same time makes us aware of the fleeting nature of the moment, the fact that it is already over. This is the same feeling as realizing the absence found in Pompeii or the sight of functional objects behind glass in a museum. Bacon dissects and distorts the subjects in his work but never fully allows them to lose the “character of living organisms.” Through the deconstruction of the Other he arrives at an unearthing of the self. Milan Kundera in meditating on Bacon asks: “Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? Where is the border beyond which the self ceases to exist?” In the depictions of Antinous promoted by Hadrian, there are a plethora of identities which build up many understandings of the Other. These identities together build a singular reality that exists because of its ability to hold together across various renditions and metamorphoses. Schiele dissects himself through direct depiction of himself. Like Bacon there is an amazement or horror in the realization of what “we are materially.”

This space began as a place to display art but quickly became a space formed by art. The site is the page. The existing is a plan chosen on the basis that I knew nothing about it. I was free to demolish, to slice, to add, etc. The physical works eventually disseminated into the architecture following simple rules to initially guide me, such as, “any new vertical surface could not be 90 degrees to any existing wall.”These rules gave me rigor, the lack of history, freedom, but the sitelessness, frustration. It acted almost like the white box gallery I wanted to get rid of.

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The chair (s) is (are) an act of deconstruction for an act of construction. By calling the project chair (s), the question remains unanswered or the resolution undefined whether there is one chair or two and whether one is made from the other. It (they) exist (s) as two physical things, one physical thing, or 21 or 42 parts. The process, the dismantling of an abandoned chair and slow halving of each part for the assembly of two halves acted as a way to map the original chair. The bowing of a wooden member from years as the perfect place to rest a foot, or the way a bent piece had dried and cracked over time all became more evident in sectional cutting. The areas where varnish had worn away acted as a tool to aid in more precise reconstruction. The finished piece (s) itself (themselves), confuses the idea of half and half making whole. As the angle of view changes, the chair(s) disclose and hide. What could be considered half the original chair becomes both half and whole in one.

chair(s)

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“THE INDIVIDUAL IMAGINATION OF THE ARCHITECT WITH ITS

CAPACITY TO CONSTURE HISTORY AS IT MIGHT

HAVE BEEN AND IMAGINE A POSSIBLE

FUTURE REMAINS THE ONLY TRUE [MEANING],

ONE THAT MUST BE IMPLEMENTED IN THE

ART OF MAKING.”(PEREZ-GOMEZ)

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The Contemporary MuseumThe museum is a public space, chronicling human interaction and experience. It is as much about the present as it is about the past. The contemporary museum does not ignore the digitally connected infrastructure that now articulates our lives. It taps into and pulls from this network initiating sensory experience from the seemingly anti-sensory through connections with visitors. In the digital infrastructure, it exists in multiple locations or more precisely, everywhere. The contemporary museum, however, still requires physical place for the manifestation of the digital to the sensory. There are no longer neutral galleries for art, but a series of experiences that comprise the built environment. It is a functioning, inhabited part of the city. With the dissolution of the gallery, the place for art becomes everywhere. Existing art objects are incorporated into living conditions that open up to the visitor in specific and unplanned moments. The art objects are the mediator between two subjects. They are the threshold between the public and private.

The museum draws people inward but also shuts them out following an Arcadian rhythm like a traditional marketplace. This rhythm only reflects one as such found in the city. The museum of the present must accept but also propose multiple rhythms in which to exist. It could even oppose existing rhythms.

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visitor one,location one

visitor two,location two

art object/ existing collection

digital network: mediator, interaction & new production of art

Between the physical locations is a digital network transcribing events. Fragments of the visitors sensory experiences are projected, isolating them but making them available to other viewers in other locations.

There are two types of experiences that occur. In each, the art objects serve as mediator between people.

In each physical location, visitors experience art objects directly. The traditional galleries serving to neutralize the space art is viewed in are dissolved into the city. The storage facilities become apartments. The threshold between private and public and the excuse for voyeuristic interaction are the objects. These interactions between people initiated around the objects are the formation for new art. “...the museum elevates itself from a place of and for art to the level of art itself” (Weibel).

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5959599

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“IN’ ‘ON THE MUSEUM’S RUINS,’ DOUGLAS CRIMP ARGUES THAT POSTMODERN ART EMERGES FROM A CRITIQUE OF WHAT WALTER BENJAMIN TERMED ‘AURA,’ THE TRACES OF ORIGINALITY, CREATIVE GENIUS, AND THE ARTIST’S PRESENCE IN A WORK OF ART. CRIMP WRITES, ‘THROUGH REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY POSTMODERNIST ART DISPENSES WITH THE AURA. THE FANTASY OF A CREATING SUBJECT GIVES WAY TO THE FRANK CONFISCATION, QUOTATION, EXCERPTATION, ACCUMULATION, AND REPETITION OF ALREADY EXISTING IMAGES. NOTIONS OF ORIGINALITY, AUTHENTICITY, AND PRESENCE, ESSENTIAL TO THE ORDERED DISCOURSE OF THE MUSEUM, ARE UNDERMINED.’ CRIMP’S ASSERTION THAT POSTMODERISM CREATES WORKS OF ART THAT ARE BOUND TO A CULTURAL NETWORK RATHER THAN TO AUTONOMOUS VALUE ELABORATES UPON WALTER BENJAMIN’S FAMOUS ARGUMENT, IN ‘THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION,’ THAT PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM CHANGE THE TERMS OF ART, RENDERING CONCEPTS OF ‘AURA’ AND ‘AUTHENTICITY’ OBSOLETE IN THE FACE OF REPRODUCIBILITY.”(WORDEN, 109)

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The painting was hung on the wall to the right of where we entered. The entire room was a haze of burgundy damask and sprinkled with expensive looking objects, bronze and crystal, none of which I can specifically remember now. The focus was certainly on the painting. We had entered through a tunnelled archway into a courtyard cooler than the piazza we had waited in. Ezio communicated with the guard, trying to explain why nearly twenty American students had shown up in front of one of the most expensive apartment blocks in Rome. Sifting through a flux of tiny and large spaces, a couple of stairwells with the palazzo steps I had come to love so much, their treads and risers a ratio I had never felt before January, we came to the living room. Other than the burgundy, I remember the color emerald green. I think mainly from the painting, but possibly the carpet. We pressed to each other’s shoulders, terrified of touching the furniture. The work on the wall before us had oozed the sacred presence we assigned to it, all over the rest of the room. It was an early work by Caravaggio, one of the only remaining Caravaggio’s in a private collection. We were never really told who’s it was but we were allowed a half hour visit led by a younger relative I believed of the owner, who seemed to tell us with his body language that it was okay to touch the furniture. My view of a Caravaggio had never been blocked before by a desk or a floorlamp. Although the room itself didn’t seem often used or else was meticulously set

The Work in the Living Room

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each day, there was something off-putting, seeing a work like this in a private home. But at the same time, there was something wonderful about it. After some research a few years following based on my memory of the painting, the owner was specified, Nicoletta Odescalchi. The painting had been created for the Cerasi chapel but Caravaggio is said to have been unhappy with it and in the four years that it took to hang the work he actually created a new one which hangs in the chapel today. The painting that had been in front of us in that living room had been hanging in living quarters ever since. It’s where it had been destined by the artist. (Vodret,108) We were pairing our viewing of the painting, with a certain tactile and sensory experience. Whereas the white space of a gallery with hardwood or polished concrete floors stood to eliminate everything but the work, the living room tugged at the work, emphasized, enhanced it. It closed in around it, but simultaneously let it breathe. Of course there was risk of the housecleaner bumping it, a child’s greasy hands, the potential for someone to smoke near it or perhaps a bug to enter in through an open window and eat its way through the wooden panel it is painted on. But isn’t this the point? Our perception of art is rooted in what Jorge Glusberg refers to as “a people’s expression of the individual’s obsession with survival” (Glusberg, 9). Art is a means of coping with immortality and we do this through erecting museums. By keeping the work in the living room, it remains for ourselves. But is this one of art’s very claims? That a painter paints because he or she “has to,” and a patron collects work for themselves simply because “they like it?” Probably not. Can we have both the personal, intimate liking of a work and public sharing? Also probably not, unless the patron has no idea others have the ability to view their art.

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“THE IDEA OF ESTABLISHING A MUSEUM ARISES FROM THE NOTION OF MATERIALITY. THINGS, OBJECTS, SURVIVE THEIR OWNERS.” (GLUSBERG, 9)

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Age is not ManufacturableMary Collins had handed me the stack of paper under the great chestnut tree on a spring day when I was in fourth grade, maybe fifth. She was one of my grandmother’s friends who joined the circle on the lawn in front of Carmal Court across the street from the historical society. The chestnut tree still stands in the middle of lawn. In the 1920s when Carmal Court was built, it was decided to either cast a fountain or plant a tree and for some lost reason, it ended up being the latter (for the benefit of my grandma and her friends). Mary Collins had been a school teacher at some point in her life and according to my grandmother, saved lots of useless stuff. She enjoyed the fact that I would always doodle and draw when sitting with them outside if I wasn’t busy collecting chestnuts which would later rot in our basement. Because of this, and other reasons which I would only realize later (dealing with nearing the end of ones life), she gave me a stack of slightly yellow paper from her days as a schoolteacher. I envisioned oak desks and ink wells, milk glass globes hanging from ceiling beams, dark wainscotting and wooden rulers. Of course this was slightly before her time even but I had already romanticized the past I believed this paper from. It’s yellow tinge and disintegrating edges, something so marvelous and precious I couldn’t have found in the stationary isle of CVS. For a while, I didn’t use the paper. Couldn’t. There was too much pressure. The decades hadn’t accumulated all this time simply for me to scribble something I half cared about or decided I didn’t like. After a while I approached the paper with the idea of fabricating

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something that looked like it belonged on that paper. With an old fountain pen I wrote notes in cursive emulating the signatures I had seen written in the endpapers of old books. There was something faulty in it to myself, but the results were rather convincing to my Mom and Grandma.But why did my relationship with the paper develop as it did? Where did the preciousness I gave it, come from?

My thesis is in part a test or the groundwork for a process of challenging my own inability to alter things of the past. The fact that something has existed for a long time is enough for me to leave it alone and cringe when it is altered. When I walk down a street and notice another historic house has received new vinyl windows it upsets me. When I notice a new chip in the granite base of an old public building I wonder what idiot did this to something that has lasted so well for so long (when I heard that in 2007 someone attempted to drive a Toyota Celica down the Spanish Steps, chipping a few of them, I couldn’t really grasp the idea of it. The Spanish steps? You can’t make some new 300 year old slabs of travertine to replace the damage). With the same draw that anything grotesque has, that weird desire that builds within ourselves to look at something gross or awful, I look up demolition videos of historic properties on youtube and watch them. It reminds me of that recent music video that Eric Wareheim did for major lazer. The grotesqueness is something you can’t take your eyes off of. Why am I preoccupied with not changing old things? I’m not even entirely gung-ho about preservation or “sensitive remodeling.” Is it the fact that the methods and skills needed to make things of the past only exist in specialized, dying circles and thus need to be saved as a record and an homage? Perhaps it lies in the idea that while we can replicate something old, even with the same methods and tools, we can’t make age. Age is not manufacturable. It’s not even the object or material itself, but the fact that it has existed. Thus the paper in my mind became something so special. Does that make it sacred? Only to some. Otherwise I wouldn’t have found those Victorian chairs in the trash which I wrote my risd application about.

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Understanding of Place

We have lost the ability to wander. Someone said this. I said this. I heard it again. How we comprehend place has entirely shifted. I can visit a place thousands of miles away through a screen and count the bricks on the sidewalk. Seemingly infinite data can exist about a site, but nothing about one’s direct, sensory experience of place. Where is tactility now? Have we lost it along with the ability to wander? I can understand a place through three means. There is direct, immediate physical presence, there is memory and there is an external and foreign understanding described by someone else and divorced from my physical presence.

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I LED THE WAY FOR SOME OF THE BIKING AND I REMEMBER

NOT BEING ABLE TO HELP A SMILE AND LITTLE EXCLAMATION

OF JOY COME OVER ME, SO I SMILED INTO THE DARKNESS. THE ADRENALINE FROM NOT

BEING ABLE TO SEE THE ROAD IN FRONT, WITH THE

AIR AND THE ENERGY OF BIKING AND THE SLIGHT SPEED

AND KNOWING WHERE I WAS TECHNICALLY BUT NOT REALLY

PHYSICALLY WAS EXHILARATING AND AMAZING.

PAESTUM 2009

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Las Vegas, January 2011

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Kenneth Josephsonabove: New York State, 1970, below: untitled

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Pietro Santi Bartoli published by Domenico RossiThe Temple of Saturn, 1699

IF AT ONE POINT IN HISTORY THIS IS HOW SOMEONE ENVISIONED THE TEMPLE OF SATURN,

THEN WE SHOULD BE SCARED OF THIS.

Temple of Saturn reconstruction, Regents, University of California copyright

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The Roman Forum and the Temple of SaturnThe first time I experienced the Forum it was dark and I was still getting used to the feel of the sanpietrini through the very worn soles of my brown leather boat shoes. I think I had on my tan shearling jacket which I almost didn’t bring to Rome, under the impression that “Mediterranean” was synonymous with “80 degrees and sunny year round.” I had pictured the facade of the Pantheon rising from a spacious sandy road, a desert sun beating down and possibly a jeep driving by amid vespas. It somehow didn’t seem right, but that was the image I had formed in my head and it stuck until I saw the real thing. Still, that image has fused with my memory becoming another place I have to think twice about.That first night, the forum existed to me as a large fence. The two new friends I was with wanted to try and find the Colosseum by wandering. I was completely enthralled by the idea of wandering through night-time Rome since a week prior I had been wandering through snowy New England. We proceeded the direction we believed correct until we came to a large fence. It seemed to run exactly perpendicular to the direction we wanted to go so we chose to go right and ten minutes later were at a dead end road

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and back at the fence. Nothing on the other side was lit up, it was just a black void as if I was looking at the ocean at night. Back on the sidewalk, small cars going by on our right, we decided to follow the fence knowing that it must just loop around. I guessed that it was the forum on the other side and how big could that be? Wasn’t it a block or so, just the ruins of a few Roman government buildings? The fact that the fence also looped around the Palatine didn’t occur to us at all. I had only heard the word “Palatine” in Latin class but we didn’t study the city layout. That famous model of ancient Rome had been flashed through a powerpoint once (maybe as a slide) but no one really stopped to talk about it. We continued along the fence, getting stuck in a couple more streets or driveways and eventually coming to a new void on our right, I later learned was the Circo Massimo. We walked for a good deal, my boat shoes wearing thin and my friends’ boots starting to give them blisters. I looked through the fence at dark abstract masses of brick, the only recognizable shapes, black arches. We were under a view of the Palatine that inspired Michael Graves when he drew it from the Circo Massimo. I saw it later in his sketches.The masses of Brick were entirely foreign to the classical architecture I had seen in photos from art history texts and the funny drawings in Ecce Romani. These masses along with the high fencing were things I had never expected. The forum existed as a large island amidst the city which no one could traverse. Soon later, I found out it was island no one could traverse except by paying 9 Euro during the day. I had heard that a year earlier, one could at least walk through, free of charge, to get across or around, but around 2008 they instigated the admission charge. It was now truly only tourists who inhabited. Over the last two centuries everything had been cleared including the lime kilns which appear in Piranesi prints, monumental stairs that appear in the Nolli map and the apartment housing and vegetation that appear in early photographs. The physical place had shifted from city to object.

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“...preservation will soon become prospective, forced to take decisions for which it is entirely unprepared.”Koolhaas

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“IT IS A COMMON COMPLAINT THAT OUR CITIES

LACK PUBLIC SPACE. BUT THE CONCEPT ITSELF HAS

LOST ITS MEANING IN A LATE CAPITALIST SOCIETY, TO THE POINT WHERE WE PROBABLY DO NOT NEED MORE PUBLIC

SPACE, BUT RATHER SPACE FOR SHARED ACTIVITIES. ”

(AURELI, MASTRIGLI, TATTARA)

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“...ARCHAEOLOGY,

WHICH HE [PIRANESI] SAW AS

HALF SCIENCE AND HALF DREAM.”

(LA CECLA, PURINI)

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“...THE AUTHOR [PIRANESI] OF THE CAMPO MARZIO SAW THE RUIN AS THE SYMBOLIC FORM OF THE EUROPEAN CITY, CAPTURED ON ITS ADVENTUROUS TRANSITION TOWARDS MODERNITY. THE RUIN CEASES TO REPRESENT TIME AND BECOMES SPACE, AN URBAN SPACE THAT IS POROUS AND INTERRUPTED, PARTIAL AND DISCONTINUOUS, CASUAL AND RESIDUAL, BOUNDLESS AND CONTRACTED--A GIDDY AND CHAOTIC UNIVERSE WHICH IS THAT OF TODAY’S METROPOLIS.”

(LA CECLA, PURINI)

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CALVINO, ITALO. DIFFICULT LOVES. HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY. (NY: 1984)

LA CECLA, FRANCO & PURINI, FRANCO. THE RUIN AS SYMBOLIC FORM. PIRANESI’S HYPNOTIC IMAGES- FROM MENTAL THEOREM TO POETICALLY REACTIVE OBJECT. DOMUS, JANUARY 2011

GLUSBERG, JORGE. COOL MUSEUMS AND HOT MUSEUMS. CENTER OF ART AND COMMUNICATION, COLLECTION OF THE: DOCUMENTATION CENTER ON ART AND ARCHITECTURE.

HOLL, STEVEN. WITHIN THE CITY. PHENOMENA OF RELATIONS. DESIGN QUARTERLY 139.

KOOLHAAS, REM. LECTURE ON WORK OF OMA. AREEN ARCHITECTURE SERIES. AS FOUND AT: HTTP://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=TQDJKR8HYXI

MORAVIA, ALBERTO. THE VOYEUR. FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX (NY: 1987)

PALLASMAA, JUHANI. THE EYES OF THE SKIN, ARCHITECTURE AND THE SENSES. JOHN WILEY & SONS.(LONDON: 2005)

Bibliography

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PEREZ-GOMEZ, ALBERTO. POLYPHILO OR THE DARK FOREST REVISITED: AN EROTIC EPIPHANY OF ARCHITECTURE

VODRET, ROSSELLA. CARAVAGGIO THE COMPLETE WORKS. SILVANA EDITORIALE SPA. (MILAN: 2010)

WORDEN, DANIEL. ‘BUILDING STORIES’ AND LOST BUILDINGS. AS FOUND IN: THE COMICS OF CHRIS WARE: DRAWING AS A WAY OF THINKING. EDITED BY: DAVID BALL & MARTHA KUHL. UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI PRESS, 2010

YOURCENAR, MARGUERITE. MEMOIRS OF HADRIAN. POCKET BOOKS. (NY: 1977)

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Index

A

AMEDEO 20,21ANTINOUS 36ARCADIAN 56AURELI 106B

BACON, FRANCIS 36BALDUS 19BARTOLI 79BENJAMIN, WALTER 61‘BRIAN’ (GOLDBERG) 25C

CADMUS, PAUL 36CALVINO 11, 15, 20, 21CAMPO MARZIO 114CARAVAGGIO 66, 67CARMAL COURT 70‘CAT’ (RHA) 27CERASI CHAPEL 67CIRCO MASSIMO 100COLLINS, MARY 70COLOSSEUM 98CRIMP, DOUGLAS 61CVS 70D

DELITIO, ANDREA 15, 28

E

ECCE ROMANI 100‘EZIO’ (GENOVESI) 66

G GIACOMETTI 18GLUSBERG 67, 69GOOGLE EARTH 80,81GRANDMOTHER 70, 71GRAVES, MICHAEL 100

H

HADRIAN 36HOLL 9

I

ITALY 28IPHONE 99

J

JOSEPHSON 77

K

KOOLHAAS 101KUNDERA 36

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ROME 66, 98, 99, 100ROSSI, DOMENICO 79

S

SANPIETRINI 98SATURN 79, 98SCHIELE, EGON 36SPANISH STEPS 71

T

TATTARA 106TRAVERTINE 71TREVI FOUNTAIN 74TOYOTA 71

V

VEGAS 74, 75VERMEER 25VESUVIUS 103VODRET 67

W

WAREHEIM 71WEIBEL 57WORDEN 61

Y

YOURCENAR 10YOUTUBE 71

L

LA CECLA 108,114LA QUATTRO VOLTE 27LEONARDO 16

M

MASTRIGLI 106MORAVIA 26

N

NEW ENGLAND 98NOLLI 100

O

ODESCALCHI 67

P

PAESTUM 17, 73PALATINE 100PALLASMAA 33PANTHEON 98PEREZ-GOMEZ 51PERIPHERAL 32, 33PIRANESI 100, 108, 114POMPEII 36, 103PROVIDENCE 25PURINI 108, 114

R

RISD 71ROMAN FORUM 7, 98

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