CRITIC / JASON VIGNERI-BEANE

COMPLETED / SUMMER 2013

Rome is as much a contemporary city as it is a historical one. It is in the midst of a whole range of challenges that the process of globalization brings to such an urban environment that is both dense with historical material and burdened with its status as the one of the most romanticized of western cities. Perhaps the constraints through which Rome operates due to the historical material that suffuses it will ultimately provide pressures for urban innovations and, if not creative destruction, creative bypasses toward future vitalities of contemporary urbanism.

At the same time, contemporary lessons can also be drawn from Rome’s historically evolved complexity. Across the city and at various scales one can mine the city for lessons of emergence, evolutionary design, collective intelligence, complexity, systematic change, distributed behaviors, networked zonalism, accretive negotiation, partial infrastructural adaptation, non-linear growth, linguistic drift, material development and so on. 

The Rome program engages some of these complexities within a graphic format that folds together diagrams of spatial formation and change, highly edited fragments of figuration and notational approaches to historical and contemporary information.