Festival dell'architettura

Architecture has to deal with several “fields” crossed by complex systems of forces that work with different intensities: the climate features, the urbanistic laws and rules, the technical constraints, the social and anthropological imaginaries, and so on.

A very obvious but not neglectable Field of architecture is the Ground, that is, the surface of the Earth. Nevertheless there are some important differences between the Ground and the Field. The Field, as writes Agamben, is not simply a continuous and given space: in order to employ the Ground as a “foundation Field” for architecture, we have to transform the “smooth” space of the Ground in the “striated” space of the Field: the Forma Orbis. According to my hypothesis, this transformation is performed by the cartographic representations of the Ground oriented toward the architectural design (Pizzigoni, 2011). Only by striating the Ground the architecture can find its proper placing and only a striated Field is able to accommodate buildings. Thus the difference between Ground and Field is the representational status of the second one.

A very simple but important example of striated foundation Field is the contour map. The contour lines that connect points with equal elevation don’t exist in nature: they are the result of a conventional discretization of the space that reduces the continuum of the Ground in an alternate series of lines and plane surfaces. With the contour map the whole Ground becomes a single terracing system. This reduction transforms the whole surface of the Ground in a Field for the architecture.

So, we will be never able to design a building if contemporarily we haven’t a Field on which we can design it. As a result, Vitruvius writes that the “arrangement” (dispositio) “includes the putting (conlocatio) of things in their proper places” (Vitruvio, I, I-II). But, how can we find the “proper place” of an architecture, if we don’t have available a representation of the place? Not coincidentally Vitruvius continues his text with the description of the forms of representation (in Greek ideai) appropriate to the character of the work. The first of these forms is the ichnographia, the groundplan. In Greek ichnos means "trace": if the ichnographia is the drawing of the trace of architecture on the Ground, what we are calling Field is the representation of the “becoming” of the Ground in an architectural form. Gilles Deleuze calls this kind of becoming “territorialization” (Deleuze and Guattarì, 1980). On a foundation Field, vector lines draw the integral sum of all the architectural figures that the Ground contains.

Piranesi and the denial of the Field

Manfredo Tafuri, in his essay “Le strutture del linguaggio nella storia dell'architettura moderna” (Tafuri, 1968), describes how in the Renaissance age the relationships between the architectural objects and the city were made possible by the idea of typology. The architectures of Brunelleschi, Alberti, Francesco di Giorgio, and the others Renaissance architects, can inhabit the space of the city by means the medium of the typology, because: "la struttura prospettica e unitaria del tipo, immersa nel tessuto antiprospettico della città medievale, funge da nucleo irradiante di valori assoluti, divenendo cardine di integrazione tra casualità e razionalità" (Tafuri, 1968, 18).

The space of the medieval city is thought as a negative space where the typological strategy inserts buildings capable of introducing new polarizations. Those buildings act as poles of a Field of resonance and are linked together by typological relationships which are produced through the immaterial dimension of the memory. Therefore their presence in the urban space doesn’t presume the existence of a Field - understood as representation of the Ground - because they are able to resonate with the others members of their typological family only insofar the urban space is considered as a neutral surface. Typology - from the Greek word tupos, the mark of a blow, then a stamp struck by a die - “prints” its shape within an immaterial dimension, very far away from the Field of the architecture.

For Tafuri, this typological dimension of the architecture collapses with the works of Gio-van Battista Piranesi: the Tafuri's analysis of Piranesi's graphic works - especially the Carceri and another famous Field, the Campo Marzio - shows how the absence of a Field, absence that the typological dimension supposes, makes impossible founding the architecture. The architectures of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio grow in an infinite and neutral space that denies all the other spaces. Tafuri makes it a point that Piranesi’s architectures are the products of the crisis of the typology: "Il riscatto della mutevolezza della scena urbana tramite l'esaltazione dei suoi nodi, dei suoi frammenti di spazio, delle sue sovrastrutture, implica infatti l'abbandono della tipologia come strumento di controllo razionale della città e la messa tra parentesi del problema relativo all'univocità del concetto di spazio” (Tafuri, 1980, 48).

But, why Piranesi chooses the Campo Marzio in order to destroy the idea of typology?

As Tafuri argues, what disappears in the Campo Marzio is the notion of “place” itself: "Ciò che va posto subito in chiaro, è che tutto quel frazionare, distorcere, moltiplicare, scomporre, al di là delle reazioni emotive che può sollecitare, altro non è che una critica sistematica al concetto di luogo" (Tafuri, 1980, 86). So, for Piranesi the Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma isn’t a Field. It is the only real plain of Rome: a place without orography, delimited by the slopes of the hills and by the meanders of the Tevere river. The Piranesi’s Campo Marzio doesn't show any orographic features and the whole site looks like a plain, also wherever the drawing represents the hilly parts of the city. Instead, as Tafuri writes, the Campo Marzio is a "campo magnetico omogeneo, intasato di oggetti tra loro estranei" (Tafuri, 1980, 48) within which the geomorphological features of the site of the city - the hills and the valleys - are erased.

Piranesi had faced the absence of the Field also in his Parere su l’Architettura (Piranesi 1765) where he had already developed – or better “de-constructed” - the typological theory of the origin of the architecture from the primitive hut until its dissolution in the “piazza, campagna rasa”, demonstrating that the rational search of an origin leads to the dissolution of the body itself of the architecture. What he finds out at the end of his reasoning is the Ground, or better the indiscernible couple “piazza/campagna”. But Piranesi, like the architects of the Renaissance, cannot sight the Field beyond the Ground. There is no Field able to receive and to collocate the Piranesi's architectures. The endless typological variations saturate the whole urban space, reduced to a simple and passive surface.

Paradoxically, this catastrophic exaltation of the abstract surface of the Campo Marzio, that plastically represents what it means to operate over the “campagna rasa” described in the "Parere", is strongly contradicted by the scientific interest of Piranesi about the underground world, the substructures, the caves. As Teresa Stoppani points out, also the Carceri can be interpreted as a symbolic representation of this search of a Field “under” the roman architectures: “Far from gloomy, dark and enclosed, these vast and permeable underground spaces are connected to the monumental city above. With them Piranesi suggests that the true ‘magnificence’ of the Roman edifice resided in the structural and infrastructural works that supported the architecture of the city above” (Stoppani, 2013).

Piranesi is therefore involved in a contradiction that he refuses to solve: on one hand the typological approach is no more able to organize the urban structure because the paroxystic sum of the typologies cannot produce any order, on the other hand, through the archaeological study of the roman buildings, he, attempting to find an impossible Field, scientifically explores the Ground above which these architectures were built.

Romulus and the invention of the Field

But, if we accept the distinction between Ground and Field, we can find out that the Field, which Piranesi in vain was seeking in the soil of Rome, was already been set up when the city was founded. Indeed, without necessarily supposing the historical existence of Romulus, the archeological researches of Andrea Carandini in the soil of the Palatino hill prove that in the second half of the VIII century B.C. was performed a deliberated project that implied architectural, political and religious transformations and that involved the previous system of confederated villages (Carandini, 1997). My hypothesis is that this project contains at least two cartographic devices which contributed to produce a foundation Field for the subsequent urban architectures (fig. 1).

The main act of the Etrurian rites of foundation, that Romulus has also practiced, consisted in the tracing of the templum in terrae, a rectangular fence, oriented following the cardinal points. From the templum the Augure used to observe the flight of the birds that indicated the "proper" site for the new city. The templum allowed the “becoming” of the natural Ground in an architectural Field, that is, it allowed the transformation of the geomorphological features of the site of Rome towards the architectures of the new settlement. The meaning of this transformation is not only symbolic - the little place of the templum that represents the big place of the future city - but it has mainly an operational value (fig. 2).

The legend of the foundation of Rome tells us that Romulus, by means of the tracing of the templum on the Palatino hill, has anticipated the tracing of the walls of the city all along the rocky slopes of the hill. So, the Roma Quadrata - a definition commonly employed by the roman historians - meant at the same time the “squaring” of the fence of the templum itself, the “squaring” of the Palatino hill and the “squaring” of the others hills of the settlement. Nowadays these "squaring" can be still admired, for instance, observing the monumental substructures of the Palatino or in the substructures of the Temple of Divo Claudio under the Celio hill (fig. 3).

The second cartographic device inaugurated by the foundation allowed to transform the Velabro marsh in the public space of the Foro Romano. Before being built the temples, the basiliche, the palaces and the domus, the Forum was the real first architecture of Rome, the first public architecture of the city: a simple walkable surface, obtained by filling the Velabro Valley. 

This transformation was a real transfiguration, that is a “changing state”, from water to stone by means of which a built surface replaces (and in the same time represents) the water. An indiscernible image is been produced: the abstract and perfect image of the undisturbed slack water that looks like a solid and smooth architectonic surface. The floor of the Foro Romano represents the architectural translation of the ancestral and unforgettable image of the primitive marshes. It is once again a cartographic representation: like in a map made of stone, a series of monumental engraves in the surface of the Foro - the chasms of the Lacus Curtius, the Lapis Niger, the Fons Giuturnae, and others monuments – constantly remembers, and therefore incessantly reproduces, the ancestral erasure of the marsh and its indiscernibility towards the architecture of the public space (fig. 4). 

As Agamben explains, "analogy intervenes in the dichotomies of logic [...] not to take them up into a higher synthesis but to transform them into a force field traversed by polar tensions, where (as in an electromagnetic field) their substantial identities evaporate" (Agamben, 2000). Thus in the Foundation Field of Rome were produced two couples of indiscernible figures, able to translate the natural site in a system of architectures. They are the slope/wall and the marsh/platform.

To sum, maybe it is possible to suppose that the foundation doesn't generate the city, because the site of Rome was already inhabited by an organized confederation of villages when the city was founded. But, first of all, we can argue that the foundation is that project that always produces a new Forma Orbis for the architecture. Within this Field the dichotomies become indiscernible and the Earth “becomes” architecture by means an endless molecular transformation, based on the architectural forces that "striate" the site: “What interests us in striation and smoothing are precisely the passages and combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces ...” (Deleuze, Guattari, 1980).