The Wright way: follow the river. It's your Lynchian landmark! The Tevere symbolizes a constant direction. As a point of reference, it is "increasingly relied upon as [your] journey becomes more and more familiar."
Frequenting the water's edge during the day has familiarized you with where you are. As long as the river keeps running South, you're fine. Oh and don't fall in. It's uncomfortably cold.
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Project_One has been underway for almost a week, now. Andrew, Chrissy, && I have been researching a piazza on Tiber Island, Piazza di San Bartolomeo All'Isola. The history behind the island and its importance to the mythology of the beginning of Rome makes this project so much more than an architectural analysis.
Right off the boat, I was inspired [get it? it's a pun! Did Eric hear that one? If he didn't, we better column and tell him. Oh lord. Did I just do it again?] That was lucky:
I think islands are incredible for a myriad of reasons, maybe because I've never been on one. I'm a fan of the television series "Lost," Darwin's theories of adaptation, and any concept dealing with a variable of isolation which alters characteristics of a known subject.
Example: In the Lost series, there are ridiculous amounts of changes within the people and their strategies for survival compared to what they were before. Read up on NatGeo if you want to know to what extent Darwin was able to compare and contrast species of finches and propose hypotheses based upon a Sherlock Holmes type of deduction. Finding the bones of modern animals' ancestors through the evolution process gave him an idea; a small amount of proof for the conclusions he drew.
Similar to this type of deduction, my group and I have been deeply analyzing the island and certain qualities that have evolved over time. There are temples of Jupiter and Aesculapius, whose foundations were salvaged for the present-day churches of San Giovanni in Calibita and San Bartolomeo. I love how Rome is built inside and out of itself.
There's also the imago mundi in the center of the piazza. The history behind that is interesting because no matter how many times it was knocked down, destroyed, whatnot.. it was ALWAYS rebuilt.
Eliade would like us to believe that it is this imago mundi that kept the space as a balanced composition. Borrowing from his opinion on how religion and the sacred effects our percept on life, we can parallel this "life" of religion and "death" of homogeneity with the "life" of a balanced composition and "death" by lack of an artist's eye.
What is architecture without art?
What is the purpose of all these numbers, lines, measurements... without diagrams, concepts, and formulas created in order to understand what makes something beautiful?
Everything is integrated. Numbers are static. All is needed.
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