Outline: Unfinished

I'm stuck. I'm debating what the actual architectural intervention will be. I'm not sure if my studio project is entirely appropriate. It's a fairly radical design trying to resolve the issues of the site, and thus a large part of it is irrelevant to the thesis I'm presenting here. Either that, or because it is an example of a project that was appropriated for the production of additional value, may in fact be the most relevant example.

Part 1. The identity crisis of the European historic city

• the identity of the contemporary historic city is in crisis
• the Post-Fordist restructuring of the economic sphere, and European Union integration has accelerated economic processes of commerce and exchange, instigating and escalating transnational flows of labour and capital
• these temporal and social processes unfettered by the free market environment of neoliberalism materialize at the level of the city in spatial permanences and social institutions
• in the face of failing industries and declining birth rates, global flows such as tourism and immigration are a necessity to the historic city, and yet these global flows disrupt the authenticity of the location and culture
• the conflict is as thus as such: The market has dictated an urban identity defined by difference, that is untenable to its state engineered identity
• the internal contradictions of this process cleave authenticity from the historic city, reducing urban development to the fabrication of an image and marginalization of elements that threaten this image, a process that does not reflect the true cultural and social identity of the contemporary historic city
• [Insert research about Asiatic and African migrant flow into the Mediterranean area, and Rome’s immigrations statistics]


Part 2. The paradigms of vision

• the relocation of manufacturing sectors in the 1970s from, developed to developing regions have shifted the Keynesian-Fordist economy in the transformative powers of state planning to a Post-Fordist economy based on the fluidity of market processes
• therefore there has been a global shift in ownership models from public and private in the Post-Fordist era, or the era of neoliberalism
• this current era of neoliberalism relies on the combined acceleration of production and consumption in order to maintain economic equilibrium
• accelerated consumption is manufactured through a parallel image market in order to match accelerated production
• imagery and commodity fetishism has thus penetrated the societal psyche to such an extent that as Debord observes: capital accumulates to image, and image mediate relations, roles and values between people
• thus giving rise to what is variously called: media society, the society of spectacle, consumer society, the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption, or postindustrial society
• contemporary geopolitics, based on relations between countries and markets, is waged through large-scale complicity fabricated by these paradigms of vision
• the collective image is thus manipulated by the state to inform collective opinions, collective identities, with the prime tool often being the major media: the most egregious example of which is Berlusconi`s manipulation of Italy`s media sector and public space
• (Insert research about Italy`s Grandi Stazioni project in 2003, that shifted stations from public to private ownership models, hopefully other information to other spaces)
• The minaret ban in Switzerland, the veil ban in France, and the policing of public space in Italy are symptoms of this conflict between state-engineered images versus the urbanism of difference created by free market forces
• architects and architecture is complicit in this visual fabrication
• the commodification of architecture has lead to the gradual irrelevance of the profession, reducing architects to enablers of larger power structures
• In this way architecture like graffiti or pornography, `bears an obscenity...the architectural drawing can support specific meanings that the everyday experience of the actual building prevents...`( Tschumi, 12)
• Urban public space are charged spaces that are engineered to fabricate an image and identity of the city
• architectural interventions in this highly regulated, market-oriented realm has usually been limited to inserting state-friendly spectacle that fuels urban inequality and inauthenticity
• Example: Termini Train station, Trastevere, Vatican, Navona



Part 3. The Production of Added Value through Image Disruption

• Urban public space are charged spaces that are engineered to fabricate an image and identity of the city
• architectural interventions in this highly regulated, market-oriented realm has usually been limited to inserting state-friendly spectacle that fuels urban inequality and inauthenticity
• How can architecture go beyond fulfilling requirements of project to create built environments that can address legitimate social and cultural identity of the city.
• architecture interventions have an opportunity to disrupt the visual complicity of conventional urban processes by portraying “the complexities of urban reality and socio-cultural and economic characters of urbanised nations”
• creating in opposition what Stefano Boeri has called, ‘geopolitics of multiple identities’
• Architecture deals with image of city, and thus exists in tension with memory, identity and opinion of the city

Part 4. Termini Train Station Intervnetion

• ???