Cornell in Rome

Two weeks ago, we took a trip up to the Emilia Romagna region to visit Parma, Modena, Reggio Emilia, and Bologna with Professor Jeffrey Blanchard.

With views of snow covered roofs and a noticeable drop in the temperature, it was clear that we were in a different region, far from the bustling city of Rome. Noticeably more wealthy than the southern regions, these sleepy cities in a way resembled many of the German and Swiss cities which we visited two months ago. There is a quiet feel to these cities, where the peacefulness is not to be disturbed.

Our first city, Parma, is a peaceful medieval town characterized by snow covered pink and yellow buildings. Since we were traveling in early spring, the absence of tourists at this time of the year only added to the eerie silence of this town.

Parma

The architecture and art students visited the Palazzo della Pilotta, a Farnese palace that has been converted into an art museum. Within this palace is a beautiful theater built by the Farnese Family. Its wooden facade is a reconstruction of the original theater that was destroyed during the bombing during World War Two.

One cannot miss the magnificent Baptistery in the center piazza. Sixteen arches rise and connect at the center of the dome adorned with medieval frescoes.I thought this six-story octagonal Baptistery of pink and cream Verona marble was even better than the Baptistery in Florence.

We also visited several of the main churches in Parma with their magnificent painted domes and walls.

At the Modena city center

The Emilia Romagna region is also famous for the quality cars they produce, including Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Masserati. We spent Tuesday morning visiting the Lamborghini Factory in the countryside where we were greeted by Mr. Lamborghini himself. We toured the museum, learning about the company and car’s history and development.

Mr. Lamborghini

After touring the museum, we were able to hear Mr. Lamborghini, the museum architect, and the mayor of the town come and speak about the company at a joint meeting.

Professors Blanchard and Smith with Mr. Lamborghini

Nearby the city of Modena is our next stop, Aldo Rossi’s famous San Cataldo Cemetery. My encounter with my first building by Aldo Rossi was very poetic and profound for me.

Rossi’s use of repetition and monumental form may be well known, but the absence of people on the site made the experience even more powerful. With no one there but the rows of hallways and open spaces for me to explore, the experience was similar to what Aldo Rossi would describe as a city which remembers its past– where one encounters only the memory of the dead in this massive complex.

Aldo Rossi's San Cantaldo Cemetery

We also visited Santiago Calatrava’s Ponte Nord nearby, where a civil engineer was able to give us a guided tour of this unique suspension bridge, as well as the new construction site where a new train station was to be built.

We spent the later part of the day at the Modena Museum of Modern Art-a refurbished Italian factory that is now used to hold art exhibitions, as well as the beautiful town of Modena itself at dusk.

Our trip ended in Bologna-the biggest of the four cities and perhaps my favorite. There are so many things that makes this city great: Walkable streets, its medieval charm, friendly people, incredible food (of course one can’t avoid the pasta with Bolognese sauce), among others. The whole city is lined with stretches of beautiful porticoes that makes walking around the city a real pleasure. The oldest university in the world still exists here since 1088, giving the city a college-town feel.

Two medieval towers sit at the city center, which have become iconic landmarks of the city. What strikes me even more is that these towers are remnants of a series of towers which existed before in the city but had been taken down. Some historians even suggest that 180 towers (!) had existed at once in this city.

We climbed this tower-498 steps to be exact, without windows to give us any idea of how high we were. The fact that both these lean towers were leaning made the climb even more daunting. One just had to trust the skill and craftsmanship of medieval builders.

But once we arrived on top, we were rewarded with an awesome view of Bologna still covered in snow.

View of Bologna from the top of the Campanile

Stop by the AF Tamburini for its legendary meat and cheese. I have already picked up a habit of buying meat and cheese from the different towns of Italy to bring back to Rome to cook.

Stopping by the legendary A. F. Tamburini to buy some Parmesan cheese

One of Bologna's streets

Bologna's Neptune statue

At the center square of Bologna

In a week from now, we will be going on our last trip (sadly) to Northern Italy: Verona, Milan, Revereto, Como, Brescia, Torino, and Lucca. I will be sure to post some photos when we are back!

Anu Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha flew here to Rome to give us a lecture titled “Between the Monsoon and the Sea”. The married couple run a landscape architecture practice, Mathur/da Cunha and teach at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on shifting and dynamic landscapes.

They are quick to first point out the importance of seeing things in a different light in any given design problem. They take on this important paradigm as the basis for all their works, engaging in speculation and pro-active engagements with the landscape to create questions about the design problem rather than simply eliminating issues. They are quick not to reveal projects as they are, but to show the problem of ‘seeing’ behind every project and the underlying biases which we have about them.

Anu and Dilip reveal how often our actions as designers are locked within the traditional perceptions of our subjects and are often at the root of the problem. They bring up the example of the levee system during the flooding of New Orleans. The central failure may not be the levees themselves, but the oversimplified perception of the Mississippi River. Showing us maps of the Mississippi River, Anu and Dilip question the logic of drawing rivers as lines between two points when in reality these rivers are constantly flooded and violating its own boundaries. Such an oversimplification of the river overshadows the reality that this ‘river’ can in fact become everything from large pools of water to systems of waterways, and everything in-between when flooded.

They further support their point with a series of pictures of the Mississippi, which are quite different from how we may know the river. We see fields of pools of water, a delta river in a slight brown hue of mud with no clear demarcation between what is land and what is water, and parallel streams of river without any dominant stream — all to further challenge this false convention of a river as a linear element. Exactly what is river and land is clearly destabilized in an effort to rethink the very central problem of the river and flooding.

If settlements and designs are built upon this false perception of the linear river, they are bound to fail when these systems fail to act upon unforeseen events such as the flooding of New Orleans.

Anu and Dilip compare between Western and Indian settlements to show us just how different these two societies perceive water and how they influence the design process. The Western notion of barricading cities from the onset of floods is strongly contrasted with images of Indian mounds surrounded by pools of water. New Orleans uses levees to free the land from water whereas the Indian mounds embrace the flood around the settlements as part of its territory. In the Indian sense, there is no flood whereas in new Orleans, the threat of flood is a very apparent reality.

Different ways of representation of cartographical maps further show just how distant our perception is to reality. They support their argument with cartographical maps, which shows the stark difference between reality and our perceptions of water and land. The hard lining of a river and the strong demarcation between land and water shows just how absurd these maps are in places like Mumbai, where flooding is a constant reality. They show just how influential these perceptions are in development and design, as developments are generally built upon previous mappings and are therefore grounded on a false perception of the river.

The way they present their projects is as crafty and as subversive as is in their approach and thinking. They are unafraid to adopt non-traditional strategies and pathways to discover the root of many design problems, employing means of photography, sections, and modes of representation beyond traditional means.

Adopting new strategies and new ways of representation, Mathur’s and da Cunha’s diagrams capture these dynamic shifts in land and embrace the ambiguous modes of thinking between water and land. The creation of ‘soft’ boundaries and the embracing of vague and ambiguous space is clearly an influence from their discovery on water and its behaviors.

Questioning traditional norms also means embracing subjects and issues which are typically overlooked and provide for a more comprehensive solution. In one of their projects, they develop barges from the river, which takes advantage of human feces as a way to recycle and generate a profit for the locals.

As they showed us one project after another, the lecture became a way of revealing to us new ways of understanding water and land. A metaphor which beautifully describes their approach in working with water and land: “the depth of the sea is conscious because of the rising of water, displacement of water, depth and surface, horizon and boundary”