Giuseppe Strappa
The overturned city / La città rovesciata
U+D n.14 – editorial
Rome was certainly not the only victim of a rapid and violent consumption of the most precious part of the inherited city. The crisis of its historical fabric was however exemplary and the questions that its decline posed contain, as often in history, a universal meaning.
Some considerations on the historic city of Rome (on the way, above all, in which the crisis caused by the pandemic has posed new problems and some hope) may be of general significance not only because the city has been, for at least a century, an important place of experimentation in terms of interventions on its historical heritage, but also because it has given a significant contribution to the thought on the architecture of the modern city, that of Kahn, Venturi, Rowe, Muratori.
What is changing, therefore, in the historic city, meaning by this term not only an architectural and building heritage, but a system of values, functions and symbols inevitably in transformation?
I believe that the problem has to be posed in a broad perspective that considers the formative phases of the city fabric, posing the question in its structural terms, which are economic and political.