Contact Artefacts
please if you have any comments or more information regarding this record.
MenuHomeUpfront Now Up Books Towns Structures People Firms Lexicon | SNELL, JustinBorn:Architect | ||
SAIA Rome Scholar 1996-7. Justin Snell writes about his experiences as a Rome Scholar. The South African Rome Scholarship in Architecture, derived in part from the Ecole des Beaux Arts Prix de Rome itself descended from the humanist tradition, is premised on the idea of providing scholars with the opportunity to study and experience the architecture of Italy. To this end, while engaging in research in Rome, I travelled Italy from the Veneto to Sicily studying ancient and contemporary urban environments. Towards the end of my tenure I began working on the British School at Rome’s (BSR) Pompeii Project under the supervision of the Director Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. Together with Raphael Helman, we were assigned the task of surveying, documenting and creating computer generated plans, elevations, sections and 3-D models of Insula 9(Regio I), as well as producing work for the exhibition ‘Unpeeling Pompeii’. As well as being involved with the annual BSR exhibition, I was also invited to participate in an exhibition in the AAM Gallery entitled ‘Architettura di Mostra II’, conceived to enable those living in Rome to view work by architectural scholars from the various academies. As a scholar I took the opportunity to engage in academic research on the architecture and planning of Renaissance Rome, and also gave lectures, seminars and tours on the subject as part of BSR’s lecture programme and ‘City of Rome’ course. The initial impetus for my research began as an attempt to understand the urban geography and palimpsestial quality of the site that had been chosen for the Rome Scholarship competition - the Quirinal Hill. This site was to become one of the focal pieces of Sixtus V’s urban redevelopment of Rome, and consequently the subject of my doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Roma Felix, Rome of Sixtus V’. To this end I enrolled at the University of Cambridge in 1998 for the M.Phil. in Philosophy and History of Architecture, a prerequisite for admission to the degree of Ph.D. The course engages the question of what architecture is as a discipline oriented around the problem of theory. The examination of the relationship between philosophy and the history of architecture, enables one to investigate how thought has been thematised in terms of the city as the ecumenical ground on which culture takes place. By studying the city in its transformations from the Ancient Near East to the present, not as history but rather as continuity of thought, one is thus able to interpret the way in which humans structure and restructure the order of being through the construction of urban environments. The planning of Rome during the late Renaissance and specifically under Pope Sixtus V was one the key periods in the development of the city. His plan to inhabit the disabitatio through a complex strategy of urbanistic, economic and symbolic manoeuvres was the largest of all papal initiatives in this field, and the city today still bears the imprint of his forma urbis. With its straight roads to devotional sites, Sistine Rome is often seen of the progenitor of Haussmann’s Paris and L’Enfant’s Washington, and Sixtus himself accorded the accolade of being ‘the first of modern town planners’[Giedion]. To comprehend how Sixtus V’s work is situated in Rome and in relation to later planning, an investigation is required of the relationship between his specific interventions and the overall urban and ritual topography. I believe there was an overall intention which sought to reconcile the particular and historical aspects of a given situation with more universal conditions, revealing the famous arrangement of obelisks as more than the mere articulation of ritual topographies and rather as a new style of continuity. It is my hypothesis that Sistine Rome, in the way it seeks to establish the conditions for a comprehensive renovation, orients itself to the deeper order of the city to be examined as part of a much more archaic tradition of the symbolic city. After Rome and prior to coming to Cambridge, I was a finalist in the international competition to design the Constitutional Court of South Africa on the site of the prison where both Mandela and Ghandi were incarcerated. The project involves the exact problem of the relationship between philosophy and architecture, namely how does one embody and articulate the new constitution in a building which could serve as a symbol for the nation. While at Cambridge I redesigned the project to investigate how the historical and philosophical material which I have been working on can be applied in an actual situation. My time in Italy, both as a scholar and also while working in Pompeii, afforded me the invaluable opportunity to engage in research on and to examine urban sites all across the peninsula, and my work at Cambridge and on the Constitutional Court is essentially an extension of what I began there. While the research that I am doing at Cambridge should obviously be able to stand on its own as a contribution to knowledge, it is also intended to reveal and inform how the study of the architecture and cities of the past could and should be applied in the design of contemporary buildings to create urban environments which have the richness and diversity of those ancient settlements. On completion of my studies I intend to return to work in South Africa where I hope in some way be able to repay the enormous privilege which has been fostered upon me. Extracted and edited from an electronic document authored by Prof Paul KOTZE. All truncated references not fully cited in 'References' are those of Joanna Walker's original text and cited in full in the 'Bibliography' entry of the Lexicon. References
| |||