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Gabriele Mastrigli - In Praise of Discontinuity or La Leçon de Rome

763 views · Published 3 March 2015 · 1:33:38 · Indexed 23 October 2026

Channel: AA School of Architecture · 2015 · Education

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Lecture date: 2010-11-24

Organised by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Barbara Campbell (Diploma 14) Today, notwithstanding the fact that we are witness to impressive, global processes of urbanisation and concentration, a reflection on the future of the world-metropolis is still being played out in the European city, considered representative of a more emblematic condition, if not an implicit model, of the city's growth and its relative problems.

In fact, the characteristic of discontinuity that marks the urban form of the European city can be recognised in the tension between two opposing ideas of the city. On the one hand, the concept of urbanisation as infrastructure, a system of territorial organisation and control based on the performance of a certain number of activities; on the other hand, the idea of the city as a centre, a system for the representation of political, social and religious values that justify and orient these activities.

 This tension between centre and infrastructure has always constituted the richest and most original patrimony of the European city, whose peculiarity can, in the end, be traced back to Rome. What Rome has offered over the centuries, to Europe and the western world, feeding the most radical architectural visions for urban projects in the modern and even the postmodern era, is the exemplary nature of the city. If the typical Roman city is produced, so to speak, by the precepts of urban planning, Rome is, instead, the locus within which this role falls directly upon architecture that, materialising the successive symbolic aspects of the city, continually questions and redefines, using its own instruments, the very nature of its urban structure.

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