The changing urban landscape of the Eternal City

The past few years in Rome have become sort of a paradox. "Eternal Rome," a description that refers to the past and present history of this great Italian city, has become subject to ambivalence. This contradiction is set against a dichotomy of preservation and renewal, the myth of a glorious past and the hound of a virtual future.

There’s no escaping the policy change needed to transplant a new sense of modernism and transform Rome to become parallel with well-visited European capitals. This is seen as a bold step and yet hopes to deal with its own ideals and infrastructures that would maintain the "eternity" that Rome embodies and lives by. The new wave of planned developments, by way of competitions and "sexy" projects from international architects, comes as a fresh and vibrant transformation for a city that has for so long maintained stringent and permanent rules for its conservation.

Last June, I had the opportunity to be with several young "Roman architects" – architects who were born, raised and educated in Rome. With the English translation of Young Anonymous Society, Studio Gass works and strives to produce projects that seek alternative ways of implementation. Set in a modest apartment studio in Via Etruria, the group is a frequent participant in competitions, reaping awards and numerous merits in most of them. Francesca Rubattu, Danielle Serretti, Roberto Simeone, GianPiero Latorre, Federica Tortora, Chantal Sorce and GianPaolo Messina labor their daily intrusions to architecture, which they see more as a lifestyle than a routine to survival.

As one arrives at the Roma Termini Station, the sea of change begins. Passengers to and from the trains set a frenetic pace for their destinations.

The Termini Station was a hot seat in Roman history. In the last 100 years or so, it has gone through a number of highs and lows. The last two years saw a breakthrough in what had been the roller coaster commissioning of works here and there. It was first built in 1864, but it was only in 1936 under the leadership of architect Angiolo Mazzoni that a major reorganization took place at the side of Via Giollitti. In 1947, the Mazzoni Wing that faced the city in Piazza dei Cinquancento marked the first major construction after the Second World War. It was a national competition that drew 40 entries, among which was won jointly by a group headed by Montouri, Calini, and Pintorello. But it was Quaroni’s undulating steel and glass roof with 53-meter beams that left the most influence. This open salon of about 25 meters high beckons a new spirit, a new entity. It is like Fifth Avenue, New York City, with all the stores and food boutiques, library- bookstores, and kiosks. Largely, it is its internal interventions that make the significant contributions to the new philosophy toward public spaces: the concourse bookshop by Pierluigi Cerri and the restoration of the Mazzoni Wing carried out by Alessandro Mendini’s studio. The former is a delicate steel and glass structure housing the library, the latter is a temporary museum of the arts.

Going in and around Rome on foot and by car had given me new insights. Instead of the hip pizzerias in the city center for instance, we sampled a pizzeria on the outskirts of Rome, which offered outdoor dining on grass, with the gentle breeze and aroma of skewered lamb ever present. On the other hand, inside the city center, the Ristorante Duke, a bar and restaurant in viale Parioli, is a California-inspired articulation of the Pacific Coast’s sense of space, a rendition of beach houses and wooden piers. Another attraction that overshoots the Roman genre is Ristorante Reef (Piazza Augusto), whose rendition of the ocean is characterized by the use of cragged glass emoting the feeling of being underwater and the ironworks creating a weave of ropes. A decade ago, the coming of McDonald’s to Italy drew dissent. Now, because of the onslaught of new interiors, we see a changing of the guards – able to relent and shed off rigor for a more hybrid order.

It is at a distance that one is able to make comparisons. The Studio Gass group and I talked a lot about many topics of interest. The urban layers, for one, could be explained in a variety of ways. In Rome, these figures run deep. One, because there is its history that they seek to preserve and now, the street layers take up on their daily chores and public spaces. There are its rooftops, also, that had become a kind of private landscape. An enclave that is less visible to people on the street and only seen from the top. And lastly, the insertions in the gaps or cracks where the new breed of experimental works in architecture can be found.

Being in Rome does give the traveler a chance to become a student once more. The traveler, loaded with the curiosity and the diligence to learn more, seeks the city’s antiquities which are all buried as a part of a greater system of labyrinths. The web whose intricacies make up for all its intervening layers. Thoughtfully, I try to bridge a connection between conditions of my being there and where I live, asking questions of possible similarities and analogies.

As all our ardent passions to redefine the aspects of living in the city discover hardly any difference, it becomes interesting where and how my friends and I could share some significance. We both live in layers. Perhaps dissimilar in the aspects of antiquity – as the Philippines is much younger, we live here, rather, of layers, as in being between "pockets." While some of our older cities here may appear to lie in decay brought about by indifference, tolerance and not just because of poverty, they too, in Rome have rules that stringently stymie deliberate developments. The fact is that only in small pockets of imagined spaces do we see new methods of thinking making any headway.

What Studio Gass aims to show is that the European city has now become spread out, as opposed to being central in the past. In a treatise from a winning European entry this year, which they had aptly named Pole to Pole, the transformation of their site, set in Sicily, had become a nest for a mixture of urbanized programs. In this proposition, they trace the origins of the site as being part of its city proper once, in which the "terrain vagues" take shifts from that of an urban scale to one that is territorial and geographical.

The European city of the past had a very strict order of township. Now it has become widespread, where the hierarchical order no longer implies to a particular center but to an explosion of centers. Their scales are no longer determinable, but are rather encompassing. Such a breakdown could not exist in the past but has become acceptable to the new order in which the European city now is. In the Philippines, enclaves of order are organized in the form of enclosed neighborhoods or pockets. Kind of like Intramuros, where a wall is kept up to define its borders. It is here where the growth becomes centripetal or moving inwards. In Europe, the movement of change has become more centrifugal or moving outwards. In a larger sense, the identifiable node of domesticity surrounding a piazza, for instance, is taken over by a structure acting as a kind of network, a system of diverse activities.

In the S-House project my studio undertook recently, the strategy of insertion was utilized as a means of conveying two bodies in union. The old body, which connects to the fabric of tradition, and the new body, which disrupts tradition for a new language of modern living. In comparison, the insertion, taking place in some of the new European projects, implies a larger scale implosion of urbanized activities that had become domesticated and localized, built into residues, some of which were dead spaces. The new philosophy thrives on the application of dynamic layers that articulate the urban fissures of the city centers and built complete with a well-coordinated infrastructure of systems within its structure. Instead of going vertical, they spawn deep in broad structures. They extend old territories by adding new territories from within.

Such fluidity is applied in similarly placed situation where we see stitching taking place between nodes or building structures. A whole complex like the Ayala Center here in Makati City is a study in stitching, a blend of older, existing and new structures connected together through passages. They are as independent as they are connected. They take up the role that the city proper can do, with autonomy uniquely positioned to have its own set of rules. It is governed by its own economy, and is self-contained to police its own security.

But what could set Rome’s departure from the past rests in some of the new projects that feature an international cast of architects, who take with them a little of their home background and supplant it into the Roman soil. A few examples are: The Jubilee Church by American architect Richard Meier, which is a dialogue between two elements, the church and its ministry. The strong expressive curves of the church lunge in gradual cadence towards the rectilinear volume housing the community center and other programs. But the amazing part is how each of the 300-plus pre-cast concrete blocks, each weighing around two tons, is held in place by means of steel bars sandwiched between them.

In another project, French architect Odile Decq creates a strong focus in urbanizing the Societa Birra Peroni brewery whose 19th century layout and morphology were retained upon its construction in 1901. In 1971, the brewery closed down and the older buildings were taken over by the Municipal Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. Decq utilizes fluid spaces that activate its interior-exterior composition. Enlarging the rooftop as a means to create a vast ground cover, the landscape is extended from the ground up and acts to encounter the inward orientation of the building by opening the corner entry and revealing the circulation.

Roman-born Massimiliano Fuksas uses the strategy of creating different levels of visual fields by creating mammoth steel and Teflon cloud (25,000 square meters) for Centro Congressi EUR suspended between floors through woven meshed wires. Inside, a labyrinth leading to scattered levels provides the views to different visual fields. The external feature of the building structure, in its translucence, reveals the two overlapping piazzas open to the surrounding city. The seduction offered in these projects is typified by the strong influence of public spaces, where the current layers are maintained while inserting new incidence.

In Zaha Hadid’s winning project Galleria Communale D’arteModerna, the layers are articulated by creating a series of superfluous circulating flows acting like "grafted skins." As such, Hadid separates the neutrality of its past surroundings while giving horizontal emphasis to the binding spatial zones of its insertion. The ploy works very well by creating multi-level splits, as well as connections. They likewise eliminate the notion of ground by offsetting layers to move as walls, or lighting levels, circulatory ramps, and other programmatic activities. All rolled as one public space, Hadid once more strengthens the role of the new developments in Rome as one that augment and integrate its intervening layers.

The arrival of these cool architects in Rome had rubbed off on the mainstream of Italian architecture, where the nation itself had propagated a fertile climate of development around the country, as in other parts of Europe. Suddenly, there’s an upsurge of creative jostling even among the young architects. The Studio Gass prides itself on being participants in this new genre of provocateurs. In their works, the external landscapes play pivotal roles as to exaggerate the overlapping fissures that once belonged solely to the city centers.

The use of mapping as a device enables them to zoom in and out of their sites. Rather than the strict grid patterns established in the older generation of European planning, their works attempt to dissolve these patterns in the adaptation of ambiguous layers that merge and flow over one another. Best of all, the constant references in the association of the public space in the form of landscapes reduce the walls that separate the interior-exterior relationship from that of a skin to a conjugal extension of each other. Even in their interior projects, the walls are conjured to be like city blocks that fold and unfold. Horizontal bands, animating external landscapes by which incidental gaps are left out, emphasize movements between volumes.

What does this say in the end? The impact of my last visit to Rome had become more of a retrospect to my days at the AA School of Architecture in 1998. At the time, Rem Koolhass’ essay on Bigness (S, M, and XL) seemed to stir up our architectural critiques. In his Bigness view, he likens the cities to skyscrapers that had become extinct like dinosaurs because they are only monstrous in scale but already sterile in content. A game plan is introduced in the manner by which architectural planning is expanded to the scale of the city and re-introduced back to a building in the microform of a city. He uses deep buildings instead as a remedy, where there could be more chances for activities to be densified. Although Bigness was a mere provocation, it stirred up quite a reaction at a time when modern architecture faced mounting criticism for no longer being able to confront the problems of city living.

Now, a few years onward, it seems that the architectural values he put to question have spread to different directions. With new technologies and dissertations on surface, architecture has entered a phase where fulfillment could be attainable. The younger generation of architectural practices such as Studio Gass uses a wider coverage of viewpoints. And even in its implementation, there are bodies now, such as the European competition, that aim to intensify transformations in our environments. The day has come when the city is replicated in a variety of perspectives. In many cities looking to re-invent themselves, attitude and forecast will turn the key. There will be more Roman cities to follow and who knows what they will bring within our midst as well. Public Space will occupy a higher level of interest in mending the city and its peripheries and in a larger sense, the days of modern city living will finally gain the upperhand.