2010 February | Cornell in Rome

Archive for February, 2010

Feb

architecture studio trip part 2: Stuttgart + Munich

By Justin 1 Comment

Categories: Uncategorized

After our tour through Basel and Weil am Rhein, we continued our journey into southern Germany by train, moving farther away from Italy and into the industrial city of Stuttgart.

Stuttgart was quite a change from Rome and seemed to be much more liberated from its past. Unlike Rome, which is often gripped by its history in every facet of urban and architectural design, the physical destruction of Stuttgart from the firebombing of Allied forces and the city’s following reluctance to return to former ideologies, seemed to clear the way for new urban and architectural ideas.

From the neoclassical references of the Glyptothek to Coop Himmelblau’s anti-historic stance with its Academy of Fine Arts, the different notions of what the museo diffuso could be conveyed the conflicting opinion that Germany has about its past and future. It certainly provided us with a refreshing outlook of different projects and ideas.

Alte Pinakothek Staircase

The Alte Pinakothek in Munich is a good example of this particular dilemma in postwar Germany. Partly destroyed during the firebombing of Stuttgart, the museum’s destroyed areas were reconstructed in a reduced fashion, continuing the repetition of the building’s existing framework but leaving the skin of the building to simple brickwork and the insertion of a grand staircase. This renovation gave a different reading of the facade on the outside, capturing the trace and memory of the building’s physical history.

Glyptothek Interior with the Barberini Faun Statue

The Glyptothek at Konigsplatz also faced this particular dilemma, where its architect renovated the museum by retaining the building’s original structure while getting rid of any existing ornamentation.

Carnival Parade

The street running through Konigsplatz was also the location where the Third Reich used the site as an urban stage for its notorious rallies. On that day, we ran into carnival parade along the same street. Of course with all its merry festivities, animation and popular costumes, we spent some of our precious programmed time watching floats pass by and having candy thrown at us, perhaps to the chagrin of our professors who wanted to keep us on schedule.

German Carnival

Stuttgart is also regarded as the city where the automobile was invented. It therefore wasn’t surprising that we visited two car museums on the same day.

Our first car museum was the Mercedes Benz Museum by UNStudio, which brilliantly sequenced the museum design with its surroundings as well as the museum’s exhibition.

Mercedes Benz Museum by UNStudio

Mercedes Benz Museum Atrium by UNStudio

Mercedes Benz Museum by UNStudio

The Porsche museum by Delugan Meissl had a majority of its exhibition lifted above the street. The interior spaces, unlike the Mercedes Benz Museum, felt awkward and did not parallel with the quality and performance of its Porsche cars.

Porsche Museum by Delugan Meissl

Going from one car museum to the next, it seemed as if these museums were competing against each other for your attention. There is certainly a true show-off factor in all of these museums- a fanciful circus where the flare of its building represents the quality and ethos of its company.

Cutaway Porsche on display

Perhaps the most extravagant of this museum type is Coop Himmelblau’s BMW Welt Museum in Munich, Germany. The double cone glass and steel structure is quite an engineering and architectural marvel itself. But I wasn’t sure whether it was the building itself or the cars that was trying to grasp for my attention as both were displayed in quite extravagant ways.

BMW Welt by Coop Himmelblau

Germany holds a strong reputation in creating products with high attention to craft and engineering and this was very apparent in many of the buildings and infrastructure we visited. If I were an architect, I would hire a German engineer any day.

Frei Otto perhaps is one of the leading architects who is able to integrate engineering and design together in beautiful ways. We saw his Olympic Stadium, a fantastic tensile structure built for the Munich Olympics in 1968. Even to this day, the park looks cutting edge and very fresh compared to many of the stadiums we have seen.

Frei Otto’s Olympic Stadium

Herzog de Meuron, instead, employs a far different tactic for the Allianz Arena in Munich, wrapping its stadium with an innovative facade. It integrates the parking lot underneath an artificial landscape and thereby provides a magnificent procession route towards the stadium itself. The facade is beautiful and has an ephemeral quality as you move closer toward it. What may seem like a massive white object from a far distance is in fact a field of air inflated panels upon closer encounter.

Allianz Arena by Herzog & de Meuron

In a shopping mall in Munich, Herzog & de Meuron creates a vertical garden with light, creating magical and ethereal illumination of the space and surreal reflection.

Hanging Gardens

Another component of the trip dealt with public housing. We visited Weisenhoff housing, a development dating prior to World War II for the working class with reputable architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Hans Scharoun in the mix. The place became one of the showcases of what later became known as the International Style.

Le Corbusier's Weissenhoff Housing

James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart was a perfect example where the museum became an important urban infrastructure, providing a public route through its museum while recalling various Roman elements and spaces.

Neue Staatsgalerie by James Stirling

At the end of the trip, we had some free time in Munich’s beautiful central district where many of its buildings remained relatively intact.

Along Theatinerstrasse

Marienplatz

After a long day of architectural excursions, we stopped at Germany’s largest beer hall, Hofbrauhaus for dinner. Of course one cannot end this post about Germany without talking about its incredible beer and food. Unlike Italian food, German food is usually served huge amounts and has a special emphasis on meat. The beer is fantastic (try paulaner or franziskaner). And since there is no way to try to accurately describe what a German beer tastes like, you will have to go there and see for yourself!

A good German dinner with the studio at the Hofbrauhaus

Feb

Holding on with tooth and nail: Giulia Putaturo

By Ann Lui 0 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

The things that visiting lecturer Giulia Putaturo did not say in her lecture provoked more questions than the issues that she spoke about. The lecture began and remained very technical. She gave many examples of pieces that she had worked on, all of which were contemporary (20^th century.) All the works that she described were analog — sculpture, painting, installation art — and none were digital or performance based. For each work, Putaturo explained the difficulties she faced — whether in choosing the right sort of glue to reattach paint spalls, or re-stretching a canvas while maintaining the seemingly inadvertent rippling of the fabric by the original artist.

In her work, Putaturo leaned more towards science than art. Having worked in an architecture conservation laboratory myself, I’ve found that things like chemical compounds, ionized versus non-ionized water and rigid documentation are more important than the usually more vague or abstract issues discussed by painters or sculptors. In all her examples except for one, Putaturo was extremely focused on preserving art to be exactly as it was when it was purchased — even if that included going to great lengths to conserve accidental or unintentional consequences of the artist’s process.

While the public knows the names of famous painters or sculptors, from Putaturo’s lecture it seems that the industry sees artists as just another cog in a complex machine that involves agents, dealers, gallery owners, collectors, conservators, preservationists, curators, etc. Putaturo responded very definitely “No,” when asked if she consulted with artists during the preservation of their works.

“Artists are not actually interested in the conservation problem. Sometimes they care, sometimes they don’t. I think that it is important to get them involved if you can,” she said, though the original artist was only involved with one work that she presented.

Putaturo’s work in conservation provokes the question: Who takes responsibility for art, the creator or the consumer? Many of the galleries and private owners of works wanted painting to be restored to the way that they had bought them. In this way, the art remains forever static; ironically, through intensive work and effort they remain exactly the same.

Similarly, Putaturo notably did not speak about money until questioned about it, though value seems intrinsically tied to the work she does. Also while speaking about the involvement of the artist, she said, “The problem is in the market. If you sell something in the market with a high price … if an artist makes an ephemeral work, he has to sell it at a completely different price. He has to let them know, ‘This is intended to live for ten years.’”

Value conferred to a painting or a sculpture, after all, is a social construct, which in the current downturn becomes even more apparent when works like Giacometti’s “Walking Man” sell for a price that could single-handedly save Haiti.

Putaturo’s work in conservation of contemporary art strikes me as much more bizarre and provocative than the work of museums in preserving works of dead artists, who are no longer around to state their original intentions. Because the painters or sculptors of Putaturo’s interest are alive, her hyper-precise preservation of a single moment in time makes the work seem precious, unchangeable, static. Contemporary art preservation seems like the work of a pack rat — one who deals not in shiny, messy things, but in socially-constructed value and a single moment of desire.

Feb

To Trash, or Not to Trash

By Kevin 0 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

On a cloudy and dreary morning, there was no need for Professor Blanchard’s microphone introduction on the tour bus to describe the sight that was visible from the Tangenziale highway.

The Neapolitan Jungle

Below the volcano of Mount Vesuvius, and right alongside a beautiful bay, lay the fascinating city of Naples. Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, warned readers in his famous publication (Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy) about the incredible state of disarray that I was to expect in this fascinating southern Italian metropolis. As popular folklore dictates, Naples is a paradise inhabited by devils, and for those who believe in Italian orientalism, Naples is a city that is engulfed by problems of its own fault as it is occupied by an unwieldy group of citizens.

The Streets of Naples

It was interesting to note, from initial observations of Naples, why many intellectuals simply “gave up” their efforts to lift the city to a respected status worthy of the cities in the prosperous Emilia-Romagna region or the powerhouse industrial cities of the North. The Cornell urban planners visited a waste disposal facility (that could not control the rampant trash problem in Naples), a trash incinerator (that required military occupation to complete), and the Naples planning department (that blamed the tourists for the trash problem), and all that resulted was more frustration with the level of effective urban planning in the city.

Frustration with Trash - A visit to ASIA (Azienda Servizi Igiene Ambientale) - a city-owned waste disposal company

Cornell Planners see trash incinerated first-hand in Naples!

Cornell urban planners see trash incinerated first-hand in Naples!

But were the Neapolitans really to blame for their urban ills, or were there other explanations that were also important as well? Putnam associated the perils of southern Italy to its peculiar kind of soil – while a uniform system of government was established throughout the modern nation of Italy, different regions took on the role of government in varying ways as a result of previously-embedded social systems. As I looked closer into Neapolitan life, though, it seemed like the Neapolitan soil actually inspired wonderful levels of human interaction that I had never seen before.

An Amusing Street Scene in Naples

My observations from a casual walk in the narrow streets of Naples seemed quite different from the observations I had made at the political level of the city. In inner Naples, I noticed that the level of activity on the street was very high. People gathered to converse in public squares, and children played with each other on a street corner. It clearly seemed like the typical neighborhood in Naples was situated in an environment where individuals collaborated together. Norms of reciprocity could easily be established in such a dense residential area where many person-to-person associations could occur. Therefore, I realized that Naples was not as horribly “undemocratic” as Putnam and other political authors had made it out to be. I began to believe that it was elitist efforts to implement civiltà, an elitist, northern ideology of civic participation, and not the actual structure of society, that created political havoc in Naples.

And just southeast of Naples, over the “overdue-to-erupt” Mount Vesuvius, exists one of the best examples of a planned city in ancient Roman times. Pompeii is an excellent example of Roman superiority in urban engineering. Along the large cobblestoned paths that dotted the city, large stepping blocks allowed cititzens to cross the street without stepping into the remnants of a rainy day. And on that rainy day when we visited the sprawling archeological complex, the rain and its accompanying waste simply flushed out of the cobblestoned streets in a curiously-calculated way.

Artists and Planners in Pompeii

So the soil of southern Italy doesn’t seem to be the problem to the region’s political and social disorder (compared to the rest of the country, at least). Robert D. Putnam’s “checklist” to a perfect civic society certainly did not seem to apply in Naples, where the government proved to be more of a hindrance than a benefit to a healthy democratic society. Why participate in government affairs if the government does not do what you want? This seemed to be the Neapolitan take on civic engagement, and it was enjoyed by Neapolitans with gusto.

"Hey, there's no trash here!"

Feb

Architecture Studio Trip Part 1: Basel + Weil Am Rhein

By Justin 1 Comment

Categories: Uncategorized

There is always a highly anticipated trip every semester, where students travel to places that would otherwise not be covered on a weekend trip. This semester, our architecture studio went on a week-long trip to Switzerland and the southern region of Germany.

This unusual trip outside of Italy was oriented around the focus of our studio to design a Museo Diffuso. This notion is based on the idea of a museum, which not only exhibits its collection to the public, but also acts as an extension to the larger urban context. The opportunity to travel outside of Italy was a great opportunity for us to expose ourselves to a variety of different ideas of what this Museo Diffuso could be.

A small Swiss town on the way to Basel

Riding on our chartered bus through the Swiss Alps, I could not help but notice just how far removed I was from Rome. Switzerland seemed to be quite liberated from the grip of the Roman Empire and its beautiful terrain played as much of an influence in the architecture and urban surrounding.

At the train station in Milan 7AM

Our itinerary in Switzerland included a German border-town called Weil am Rhein, and then spending another day in nearby Basel. Our first stop was at the Vitra Design Museum, which exhibited collections of furniture and interior design objects in small buildings. It was at the Vitra Design Museum where many of the current famous architects established their careers with their small projects tested many of their ideas.

Frank Gehry's Vitra Design Museum

Each museum was placed near the other, making it feel as if we were in some sort of architect amusement park. We covered most of these museums in rapid fire succession, discovering a variety of ideas and ways of thinking about architecture.

Herzog and de Meuron’s Vitrahaus references the Swiss vernacular house in a playful gesture, stacking and extruding each compartment on top of each other to produce a series of interesting spaces and vantage points around its site.

Herzog & de Meuron's Vitrahaus

Vitrahaus Interior by Herzog & de Meuron

Buckminster Fuller tested one of his many Geodesic domes here. The translucency of the fabric along with the beautiful skeletal framework created a beautiful interior.

Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome Interioir

Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome Interior

A favorite among the studio is Tadao Ando’s Vitra Conference Pavilion, which integrates well with its site in an austere and elegant way. Although the building maintains a low profile from that of its flamboyant neighbor designed by Frank Gehry, the interior is composed of a series of dynamic spaces that is well crafted and takes advantage of natural light in a poetic manner.

Student Michael Lee in Tadao Ando's Conference Pavilion

Zaha Hadid's Fire Station

Facade of the Schaulager Museum

Perhaps the most interesting project for me was the Schaulauger Museum which we visited on the second day in Basel. The role of the museum here is redefined as one which not only exhibits and showcases work, but also maintains and stores art work, thereby creating a museum which plays an active role in engaging with the production of contemporary art.

Its selection of building material is a novel approach in relating to its context as an extension of its site. Pebble stones are excavated from the site, which not only become transformed into a sort of a vertical landscape around the building, but is reinvented in a sort of material alchemy on different scales. The museum’s texture and qualities are transferred through different materials and transparencies throughout the museum where the qualities of the material themselves and thus the context, are reinvented.

Feb

Anti-Vatican Rally

By Ann Lui 0 Comments

Categories: Daily Life and Events

Anti-Vatican Rally By The LGBTQ ("GLBT") Community in Rome

Yesterday, at Largo di Torre Argentina (which is right outside our studio building), three friends and I found that the streets were blocked off and surrounded by the police. There was also a helicopter flying above and traffic was stopped from all directions. Lots of young people were rallying in the street with signs and flags and costumes. At first it seemed most like a political rally.

I jumped into the crowd and spoke to some people, most of whom were very willing to speak to me in English even though I had a big camera and was clearly a tourist. Coming from San Francisco where gay rights activism is as much a life-style (shared by queers and straight-allies alike) as it is a political movement, joining into this rally felt like coming home.

Front line marchers holding up the movement's slogan "Facciamo Brecchia"

Front line marchers holding up the movement's slogan "Facciamo Breccia"

An older woman (Truchilla? It was too loud to catch her name without asking for it over and over again) who I spoke to, who is gay and Roman, told me that many minority groups (not just the LGBTQ community but also Communists, etc.) were protesting the influence that the Vatican has on political parties. According to her, even the leftist parties are forced to consistently make compromises in their policies because of the heavy influence (financial and moral) of the Church on Roman and Italian politics.

The rally’s slogan was “Facciamo Breccia”; their website is here: http://www.facciamobreccia.org/.

To be clear, I don’t live here and I don’t vote here, so their cause is not strictly mine. However, as the American Embassy representative reminded us the day before, we reside here under Italian law. At the time, the embassy was uh, reminding us not to pee on cop cars or get drugged at clubs like other American tourists (really?!). However, the idea that while living here we ARE Romans makes me sympathetic to the discrimination and legal battles that the Roman GLBT community is fighting … battles not at all unlike our own in the US.

My new friend and others carrying the rainbow flag towards Largo Argentina.

My new friend (in black hoodie, center) and others carrying the rainbow flag towards Largo Argentina.

While same-sex sexual activity is legal in Italy (which in the United States was only overruled in the Texas sodomy case Lawrence vs. Texas in 2003), LGBTQ people in Italy still find that they are not allowed the same rights and legal-protections as straight couples. Berlusconi is notably against the advancement of the gay rights agenda. Similarly, unlike many states in the US which recognize civil unions, no such institution comparable to marriage exists for queers in Italy. (See: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-7385.html/)

Nonetheless, I am also hugely sympathetic to the Vatican: that while it is imposing its view that homosexuality is a sin and a choice unto the state, it is doing its best to save souls and preserve the good in people in accordance to what they believe is right. The line separating church and state unfortunately is much more fuzzy here in Rome than in the United States (where it is fuzzy still) where the population is majority Roman Catholic and the church historically has always had one foot in state power.

While, according to the protesters, the political parties find themselves indebted to Vatican influence and/or money, so does the Church find itself tied to political agendas and biases. While more liberal sects of Christianity (Methodists, Unitarians, etc.) have accepted the LGBTQ community into their folds, perhaps if the Vatican was less tied to political interests (who sometimes, of course, oppose gay marriage and rights for more reasons than just religion alone) there would be more opportunity to at least consider re-evaluating their stance on homosexuality. Regardless of whether the Church’s stance on homosexuality is “right” or not — to me, the Vatican loses some agency in issues regarding the heart and soul when they are so closely tied to the state — whose interests are, philosophically and historically, in the social contract.

Besides, in keeping with Valentine’s Day, a Jan. 2010 poll shows that 51% of Italians believe that homosexual love should be regarded to heterosexual love. Spread the love, right?

Chest hair, lace and furs. A very Italian cast of characters.

Unsurprisingly, young people made up the majority of the rally

Lots of people in faux-religious garb, attracting the attention of photographers and friends

Graphic design rule: if you don't know what to do, make it big and make it RED.

Protesters at the rally, not un-prepared to face the lines of police.

Feb

Snow in Rome!

By Ann Lui 0 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

Shannon looking out of our kitchen window at the snow

Snow in Rome, for what many people say is the first time since 1985. Flurries outside my window. Waking up to snowflakes as big as grapes in the sky. Wakin’ up all the roommates and yelling and running around the apartment.

Bus stuck in the street. Ten minutes later two buses stuck in the street. Twenty minutes later two buses stuck in the street, hella cars and a group of carabinieri with whistles doing their best to direct traffic and totally failing.

Spontaneous snowball fight in the street with the family. Running up to the American Academy, meeting other Romans taking pictures of the snow. General madness. Jokes about The Day After Tomorrow. Terrible, terrible YouTube videos of snow in 1985 at the Villa Borghese. Snow melting into puddles.

Big snowball on my neck, miserably wet and cold but don’t really notice. More snowball fights. Running in the street, getting laughed at by old ladies, laughing Eric getting obliterated by six snowballs simultaneously. Setting off motorini alarms and accidentally hitting passing cars (accidentally!) Snow in Rome. For the first time in 20 years, or 3 years, or something.

Karuna getting chased by Javier outside the apartment; photo by Claire Moser '11

Javier gets ready to smash.

Shannon and I getting ready to launch another attack; photo by Claire Moser '11

Snow from outside our window, bus getting stuck going down the hill

Feb

Gettin’ Artsy at the MACRO Opening

By Ann Lui 0 Comments

Categories: Events

For many tourists, especially for me circa 12-years-old on La Grande Tour with the family, “traveling” pretty much means running around museums. Literally — running — since it’s painfully true that it would take six years to see the entire collection at the Louvre if you spent a token 30 seconds on each work. Your feet hurt, you’ve seen hundreds of religious paintings and marble busts, and even the fantastical stuff with angels and Neptune don’t really interest you anymore. Had I not been uh, twelve, on my last visit to Europe (which involved a wham-bam circuit of the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Rodin Museum and many others), the museum bars might have been pretty damn alluring.

Rome, of course, is famous for museums — the most famous of which right now are the subjects of our joint art-architecture studio project (including the Musei Capitolini, the Crypta Balbi, the Montemartini and of course, Cornell alum Richard Meier’s little layer cake, the Ara Pacis). I’ll skip the famous ones (for now) in favor of the well-heeled and “avant-garde” (more on this later) opening at Rome’s MACRO Museum.

My apartment mate and friend, Mike Lee, has been working for Roman artist Pietro Ruffo since last semester. On a side note, Mike shares with me profoundly good taste in bad music (Boston’s “More Than A Feeling,” Akon’s “Love in This Club,” etc.), unrelenting wanderlust, and a passion for languages. Mike’s boss, Ruffo, is currently exhibiting at MACRO a sculpture-installation-intervention that Mike had worked on. I went with the Trastevere apartment mates (whom we’ve been calling La Famiglia in a mostly non-mafia-ish way) to see Ruffo’s work.

Enzo Cucchi sketch of MACRO installation; from roma.museum

Enzo Cucchi sketch of MACRO installation; from http://macro.roma.museum/

MACRO, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, is one of several modern museums that have taken over industrial sites (part of the Brooklyn-loft aesthetic that now connotes modernity and money). Upon entering — after fighting through a pack of young Italians in high-collared coats and older Italian women in furs — we were confronted by a tall nightmarish tower. Several stories high, made of jet black steel, ascending through artist Enzo Cucchi’s “Costume Interiore” was like stepping into the Nightmare Before Christmas or maybe a John Hejduk imaginarium, deserving of a name with capitals, maybe Tower Of The Suicide. With no apparent spaces for residence or inhabitation, ascending up wiry staircases left this visitor slightly disconcerted and touched by vertigo.

At the top, I made friends with a transgender woman dressed in a gorgeous fur coat who taught me how to swear in Italian. She smoked a hand-rolled cigarette to fight the queasiness (while we were, after all, indoors, albeit in a Rapunzel-ish location). We didn’t get each other’s names.

Tower art installation surrounded by people at MACRO's opening.

Tower art installation surrounded by art(sy) Romans at MACRO's opening. Photo by Javier "Suavi" Alvarado '11

Two floors up, Mike’s artist, Ruffo, had his work paired with that of Valentino Diego in the same space — the two exhibitions were collectively called “Roommates.” Both projects were extremely physical. While in most museums, you’re able to wander from painting to painting, uninvolved and mostly unfeeling, in “Roommates,” both artists’ projects forced the viewer into engaging with the work. Valentino’s “Studio per DYnamic MAXimum tension” was a constructed ground plane of halved bicycle frames, forcing well-heeled visitors to step delicately across the room.

Ruffo’s “Nuovo Paesaggio Italiano” consisted of two paired, uninhabitable structures — maybe something out of Calvino’s Invisible Cities — under which were two mirrors. To see what the mirrors reflected, the viewer had to bend down and gaze below these fairy-tale-esque structures, revealing that inside them were suspended thousands of paper cockroaches swarming on geometric volumes.

While there is prolific installation art at museums in the United States, MACRO’s willingness to let people fully inhabit works — from touching them, to walking on them, and climbing inside and out of them — felt vastly different from the sort of hyper-sensitivity I’ve experienced at other museums. At the Calder exhibit in Rome, for example, sculptures that were meant to be moved and interacted with were set into motion with — literally — a ten foot long pole, swaddled with non-damaging padding and gauze.

At MACRO we were reminded that art and architecture are not just pictures on the wall (or in magazines) to gaze at — but rather works that can be appreciated with the same sort of physical vigor with which they were produced. The free Campari didn’t hurt either.

Feb

Campo dei fiori

By Justin 0 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

Campo dei Fiori at Dusk

Only a 5 minute walk from our palazzo, Campo dei Fiori is a popular piazza where many of us come to shop in its open markets during the day and dine at night. Over time, restaurants and bars catering to tourists have begun appearing (and often with strange names), but the Forno Campo dei Fiori is a must visit. It is a bakery on the west side of the Piazza with probably some of the best pastries I have ever eaten.

The festive piazza also has a darker history, where the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt alive in 1600 because his ideas were deemed to be heretical by the Roman Inquisition. A statue is erected at the spot of his death, defiantly facing the Vatican to this very day.

Feb

Back to Rio

By Justin 0 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

Rosalia

Part of our intensive Italian language crash course includes organized outings to expose ourselves to the city of Rome. One of the events was a bossa nova concert held at the Circolo degli Artisti, an intimate bar where weekly concerts are held. Bossa nova is a style of Brazilian music from Rio de Janeiro which originated from a combination of samba and jazz.

Drummer

A bossa nova concert wasn’t exactly what I was expecting to see in Rome but being a big bossa nova fan myself, I couldn’t resist going to the concert. Following a contemporary art installation event at the MACRO, a group of us headed to watch Rosalia Souza and her group play. With several songs into the show, you could tell that the audience was really enjoying the catchy beats and the charisma of Rosalia herself. The night was a fantastic barrage of musical stimuli with its great mix of catchy rhythms and spirited tunes.

Pianist

For a moment, the music brought me back to my time in Rio de Janeiro, where bossa nova is still is very much embedded in the culture of Brazil. The music inherits an attitude which Brazilians call “jeju brasilieu”, which means the brazilian spirit- basically, deal with things as they come and be content.

Feb

Discovering Rome Backwards

By Justin 0 Comments

Categories: Uncategorized

Piazza Santa Maria in Trestevere

Discovering Rome is like experiencing deja vu. I find myself familiar with the things I see, but don’t know exactly where they come from. Being in Europe for the first time, there are things that are new to me, like getting used to the idea that the historic center of Rome is only slightly larger than the Cornell campus, or realizing just how sensual the city really can be with its intimate streets and piazzas. Yet despite all these differences, I find myself strangely familiar with the place and without the cultural shock that I expect when traveling abroad.

Our studio, Palazzo Lazzaroni

This very deja vu experience describes the awkward predicament I am in. Coming from America, I realize just how difficult it is to comprehend what I am seeing here. For all my life, I have been surrounded by reconstructions of Rome. As gorgeous as the Trevi fountain really is, I find it difficult to fully grasp its significance when I was just at the Trevi Fountain near Ceaser’s Palace in Las Vegas a month ago. Roman columns, which were once hailed as prized war items by the Romans, are also a favored style for home owners back in my home state of Arizona. From common household food items like spaghetti to the basic foundations of Western thought and philosophy, Rome has no doubt infiltrated my world in both blatant and subtle ways. I am a product of a glamorous Rome made convenient for capitalism, and without the often brutal history behind it.

Children running along Pont'Sant Angelo

This uncertainty is also coupled by my inability to comprehend the vast history of Rome. How does an American like me, who has always lived a highly manufactured lifestyle no older than a couple of hundred years, allow me to understand the weight of timeless place like Rome? This particular handicap, blinded by my postmodern notions of Rome, is going to take some time to take off in order for me to better understand the weight of such history.

Statues along Pont'Sant Angelo

Rome’s far-ranging influence is truly a testament to its significant and cultural hegemony across the world. When traveling in South America with a Cornell studio two summers ago, I was able to see and experience native cultures that were radically transformed and fused by European colonial powers. But having encountered South America first, I must now re-trace my steps and find myself back at the origins of these colonizers, bringing my senses and journey back to a full circle.

What it must have been like for Gladiators awaiting their fate

For most people, a semester is a long time to explore Rome. But the longer I have been here, the more I realize how much more I must unravel. It is not without coincidence that the Romans call this the “eternal city”. The amount of political groups, factions, and desires that have long shaped this city leaves me in an endless hole that I must constantly unravel.

Piazza della Rotunda

People say that traveling to a new place is very much like being born again to a new world, where the places we attach our identity to are suddenly stripped away. I’d like to think of my time here in Rome as doing just that, not only losing myself in the process, but finding my place in the world.

Roman Forum

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Archive for February, 2010

architecture studio trip part 2: Stuttgart + Munich

Holding on with tooth and nail: Giulia Putaturo

To Trash, or Not to Trash

Architecture Studio Trip Part 1: Basel + Weil Am Rhein

Anti-Vatican Rally

Snow in Rome!

Gettin’ Artsy at the MACRO Opening

Campo dei fiori

Back to Rio

Discovering Rome Backwards

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