The thesis Rom. eine Hommage is a confrontation with the city and society, using the example of Rome to treat the extent to which these two forces influence each other. Rome was chosen as city because in 2018 I worked in an architecture studio and wanted to deal with a „real problem“ for my diploma thesis. During my first time in Rome, many „real problems“ were found, e.g. the traffic situation and the lacking public transport system, so I started my research on how it came about and investigated the question why Rome looks the way it does. Through increasingly deeper insights the conclusion came to light that the idea of changing something for the better with a single architecture or an built intervention on an urban scale would be simply naive.
The Roman urban organism is an urban tumor and its problems cannot be confronted by „classical“ architectural interventions. After more than six months of research on Rome‘s urbanism, it became clear that it is impossible to write anything better than historians who are specialized in particular periods or events, so I started looking at the unbuilt rather than the built, following the advice of Stefano de Martino, who proposed that I should look for something about which there are no books. This was the twist in the work, which in the end is about unconscious and socially external places in the city.
Through the historical research I could only understand afterwards that the urbanistic history of Rome is actually to be read like a drama; in this social construct there is an incredibly deep hopelessness and disappointment and the lack of trust of everyone towards everyone is reflected in the urban structure. Through the expulsion of an entire generation from their city during the times of fascism to the so-called Borgate, where an incomprehensibly great misery and suffering prevailed in society; through the next generation, which was deported from the ‘Borgate‘ even further into isolation to the periphery into the so-called ‘Intensivi‘ - always due to the irresponsible actions and ruthless speculation of the powerful in the city - up to their children, who grew up in the terrible conditions of the ‘Intensivi‘ and then in the 80s and 90s understandably decided to defy the politicians, aristocratic speculators and above all the state itself and take their luck into their own hands.
Since then, not only has the population‘s trust in politics been lost, but also trust among themselves and thus in their own social collective.
From a rational and spatial point of view, it should be added that through these developments, the control of the city as an urban construct has simply been lost and I am convinced that the solution of the „non-functioning“ city, of which its inhabitants report, is not anchored in politics or urban planning, but in the intellectual and moral attitude of its citizens.
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Rom. eine Hommage
Diplom thesis at the University of Innsbruck
By Stefano de Martino
So looking for a confrontation with this uncontrollable nature of the city, the unregulated, out-of-society and exciting places in the urban organism absorbed all my attention, because even if Rome appears like a tumour, it is a living city! For me, these porous places are the logical result of the interaction between the city and society in Rome. Through a theoretical process of exclusion, all the places in the city that are, so to speak, regulated were then excluded in order to get at the unregulated.
The result is 261 more or less large, small, prominent or influential places, which have been processed through their analysis, both through theory, such as density analyses, architectural theoretical approaches and interpretations and guided discourses, but also in practice through inspections, the empathy that comes with being there and documentating them.
The aim is to reintegrate these places into the social collective and to convince the Romans that the current situation is a unique opportunity to define a new self-confidence towards their own city and to rediscover themselves as an urban collective.
The spatial, architectural solution is the idea of the hyperknots, which can be seen on the bottom. An immaterial network of visual knots is to be implanted into the cityscape in order to embed itself in the linear process of the offended and seemingly hopeless relationship between the city as structure and society as an urban collective, and to enable connections. These are visual phenotypic events, which are to be placed on the hardware city like software, thus inviting society to curiosity, participation and adventure.
