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From Sunday.

I'm south of the city and in the strange land of EUR, Mussolini's great urban design experiment: Esposizione Universale di Roma. Aside from a handful of buildings and monuments that are well-done, most of it is just as ugly and deserted as many U.S. cities on a Sunday.

The main reason I travelled to EUR was to see the the Museo della Civilta Romana (Roman Civilization), and it probably would have been really incredible if it was the 1st thing I saw here: full of ancient Roman inscriptions, artifacts, and art. But honestly, after 9 weeks, I'm a little saturated with this kind of stuff.


(above: Suz, saturated. I am mastering the art of self-photography.)

The two best parts of the museum were:

1. Plaster casts from Trajan's Column: 125 total panels that measure approximately 4' high by 9' long (below). It kind of feels like: here's the story of my civilization, in a nutshell, with heroes and commoners, animals, buildings, food, battles, religion, technology, engineering, how people fought, how they built, how they harvested. It makes you wonder how we would depict our current civilization graphically, without language.


The disappointing part was the lack of women in the depictions - 1% is probably a generous estimate. Although - the largest single figure portrayed is a woman, possibly a representation of Athena, although she is winged.

2. And the best part of the museum.... drumroll... is the 1:250 scale model of ancient Rome. This monster is approximately 40' x 40' in plan and shows all of Rome at its height in the 4th century (below).

In the background, by the way, is another plaster cast - this one from the Arch of Constantine.

I looked at this model for about an hour, and I could have easily stayed longer. It was so fascinating to see the recreation and compare it to what is left today. I also made a movie, which I would be happy to email to you if you're interested. Below is the center of ancient Rome, looking north-west. Start at the Colosseum. Palatine Hill is just to the left. And just to the right and a little higher of the Palatino is the Roman Forum with the basilica-plan temples. The larger complex to the right of the Colosseum is the bath of Trajan. And of course, the inner city wall is prevalent in the model. I took lots of photos, so when I have some time I'll be updating many old posts with applicable photos from the model.

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A little more about EUR. It's definitely designed for the scale of the automobile and not of the pedestrian, I thought as I crossed yet another wiiiiiiiiide highway with no cars as the sun beat down on the asphalt.

The one bright spot I found was the church of guess-who... yup, Peter and Paul.


It reminds me of Otto Wagner's church in Vienna that I liked so much in 1999. Traditional geometry (cross in plan, central dome), but interpreted with a clean, modernist palette of materials. I especially liked the duality and symmetry of the statues of Peter and Paul in front of the church: each under his own tree.

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Massimilano Fuksas' new Centro Congressi building has not broken ground yet, but the site has been fenced off, and a model of the building is displayed. The building concept is an enormous glass box with steel trusses that suspend a cloud-like morphous building from cables.


Structurally, and from the viewpoint of future conservation of this unique structure, intentionally endowing a building with so much potential energy makes me nervous. And on the architecture side, siting a convention center, which has the highest possible occupancy loads for egress, in the air is counter-intuitive at best.

It will be a challenge to engineers in 50 and 100 years to assess the corrosion of the steel cables. But it's still a neat concept, albeit one that every 2nd year architecture student has had at some point. It would work better in an temperate climate in respect to heat gain, of course. I look forward to coming back to Rome and seeing the completed building one day.

114 prego!

(above: a very cute structural intervention)

Prego is more than a company that makes spaghetti sauce. It is an extremely useful word in Italian.

Scenario #1: You want to tell someone to go on ahead of you, for example into an elevator, through a door, etc. "Prego."

Scenario #2: Some one thanks you for something and you want to say 'you're welcome'... "Prego!"

Scenario #3: Someone spoke too fast and you want to say 'how's that again?" - "Prego?"

Scenario #4: You walk into a restaurant and the waiter wants to hand you a menu but you're not paying attention, he says "Prego."

Scenario #5: A mother asking/telling her kid not to do something is "Ti prego!"