Contextual Studies

Contemporary Roman Architecture

Tour with Scott Schlimgen

About Scott Schlimgen

He is the American Institute of Roman Culture (AIRC) Vice President for Architecture and Program in Architecture Director

Scott holds a Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
He went to Rome in 1990 as an architect and practiced there for a few years. He began teaching in 1991, and has been teaching American programs ever since. Scott travels back and forth between Italy and the US teaching and practicing.

THEMES

Values

Our tour with Scott revolved around the theme of values that are given to objects or buildings. Being in Rome and around all the historical architecture and monuments, it gave us a better understanding of the importance of the environment around us and how to use this information to look underneath the surface of the city. When looking at projects in the city of Rome and new work in the city, there are key points to keep mind. We give different kinds of values to objects and buildings, and these values change over time.

There are 5 different kinds of values, created by Alois Riegl
1. Commemorative value: Value we give to a monument because it commemorates something. It must be protected, and needs to remain in place. If it ceases to exist, it loses it's commemorative value.
2. Historical Value: Value given to an object because it describes an historical period. An object increases in historical value when there are few objects from the same historical period.
3. Age Value: Value given to objects and monuments, because they look (and are) old. Something that displays age. The mere passing of time gives them importance.
4. Newness Value: We give a value to every object when it is new. It is very difficult to preserve newness value
5. Use value: We value something because it is useful to us.

"The five of these all work together, and are all decisions we have to make as designers, when we are making a new monument, when we are responding to old monuments and we're thinking about the city."
- Scott

AUDIO CLIP: [The idea of values]

"... the whole idea of art historical value. How we give value to objects, new objects, old objects, artworks, buildings, pieces of music, etc, and how that changes over time, and how subjective it is.
The first key thing that I want to point out is that no object has any inherent value whatsoever. I would argue, that objects or works of art only have the value that we give to them, and because of that, we might give very different kinds of value to these things. And it may change over time."

AUDIO CLIP: [Our own period doesn't have any value]

"Well here is a problem, in a city like Rome which maybe for centuries could point back to a single ideal, let's say early imperial Rome, and feel very confident that that was the standard by which to judge, evolves to early 20th century where there are a myriad of styles to which may be held up as worthy for emulation. We got republican Rome, imperial Rome, the middle ages, the Christian, Byzantine Rome, Renaissance Rome, Baroque, 18th/19th century, all of these styles existing side by side with relatively equal value to the point to where we arrive after the second world war, where we have this inversion where there is an absolute negative value or negative absolute value. All other times in the city have more value than our own. Isn't that strange?
So it doesn't matter what historical period you think is valuable, as long as it isn't the 20th century. Because there is basically a stop to all works in the historical city after the second world war, because they might infringe on the historical character of the neighborhoods around them."

Layers

One of the major important themes of the tour was the idea of layers. Rome is a city of layers, both historically and literally in the form of ancient cities and ruins that exist beneath the streets. These layers have been built on top of each other over thousands of years, resulting in buried ruins waiting to be uncovered. The importance of these tours helped us understand the layer system of Rome, while giving insight on what shaped modern Rome, what has changed, and how the city is moving forward culturally and architecturally.

Furthermore, there is a challenge in building new developments in Rome, and in a way that enables the layered history come through. Tom Rankin mentions Rome as a city that can rest on the architecture that exists while having the luxury of building something experimental in architecture, an example being the new Rem Koolhass project in the Mercati Generali.