Assembly practices between visions, ruins, and reconstructions
Workshop, Symposium & Publication
The subject of the conference Promenades dans Rome was the city in its role as an eternal archive of references for the practice and theory of architecture. Understood as a monumental Wunderkammer, Rome contains a marvellous patrimony of fragments ready to be recomposed in new architectures. But it also reveals the ways these fragments have been assembled over the millennia, becoming the largest and most complex work of art in the world.
EPFL school of architecture with the Istituto Svizzero di Roma organised a dialogue with the aim to offer a discussion on critical reading of urban phenomena prompted by the theory of art, in both its written form and the practical dimension of artistic production and manual technique. Scholars and researchers produced an open reflection bringing together the specific contributions of their respective disciplines.
The roundtable addressed issues of Rome as “city built in fragments”, “model of additive practice”, “atlas of affinities” and “repertoire of analogies” through a dialectical approach confronting history, theory, criticism, photography and architectural design. In this way, the city of Rome simultaneously constitutes the subject of any reflections and, through the history of its representations, its main theoretical and methodological reference. A printed volume was published collecting the material produced during the seminar and all the contributions selected for the final round table.
