Substraum Architecture: characters of permanence in the formative process

Saverio Muratori in Studi per una operante storia urbana di Roma gives us the need for new critical-historical and critical-technical categories for defining the urban forms of historical fabrics that find a virtuous example in Rome. The themes of the categories deduced concern the continuity of the relationship between the ancient city and the medieval city and the permeation of building types and their functional and structural features that allow a clear reading of the formative process. Starting from the concept of “organic hierarchy of forms” the accentuating, cohesive and unitary structures will be treated, represented by the resilience characters of Roman public and monumental buildings that differ for the urban role from the most elementary structures to modular and rhythmic fabrics represented by the residential building. During the crisis of the seventh and eighth centuries, monumental buildings allowed a contraction and reorganization of fabrics thanks to the ability to “unite in variety”, or to share common basic values, autonomous and individual forms that, although different in size and in the forms, they reflect the unity and scale of the city. Through the reading of the phenomena of building transformation occurred on the (and from) ruins of the theater of Marcello in Rome, urban phenomena will be treated that allowed the persistence and evolution of the special organism. The proposed research aims, through the study of the architecture deriving from an ancient substratum, to show the educational process of building organisms capable of adapting themselves to change and of physically transforming themselves within the productive cycles.