The Nolli Plan as a Palimpsest for Creative Urban Design: from imitation and assimilation to invention and meditation

The Nolli plan as a palimpsest for creative urban design. From imitation and assimilation to invention and meditation. Author : arch. Alessandro Camiz, Dipartimento di Architettura e Analisi della Città D.A.A.C., Università degli Studi di Roma “LA SAPIENZA”, w3.uniroma1.it/daac Abstract: "Curandum imitatori ut quod scribit simile non idem sit..." This research shows an example of architecture of modification, vox media between the opposed terms of “conservation” and “transformation”. This example is an attempt of creative urban design using an urban tissue taken form the Nolli Plan as significant text, and writing new shapes with strong relations of form and sense with the urban surroundings. The design process: Inventio. An image invention on a central part of the city of Rome, a digital collage of different plans, from the Forma urbis marmorea severiana, to the aerial photograph, using the Nolli Plan as a central pivot. The demolished parts of the city are reinvented through their past image shown in the Nolli Plan. The Ivan Leonidof project for the House of Culture in Moscow is juxtaposed to the Nolli palimpsest to evoke the invariant character of the urban void with symbolic meaning as a collective space. This invention technique is a metaphor that prefigures the design process, i.e. writing a new fragment within an existing context creates shape and sense relations with the adjacent fragments. The design process: Cogitatio. A design research on a highly significant central space: the Gates of the Imperial Forums in Rome. This example is an attempt to build the limit of the central archeological zone of the city of Rome. The hypothesis is the demolition of the Via dei Fori Imperiali and the introduction of a new pedestrian connection between the Piazza Venezia and the Colosseo . The building has 3 different parts: the gate, the porticus, the ramp, each symbolizing an important contextual relation with the surrounding urban form. Each fragment of the city, here is represented through a level in the stratigraphy of the site, and the architectural composition connects the different levels. The Nolli plan was adopted to integrate missing parts of the city and as a device for interpretation of urban meanings. Site shifting: This method was applied for the Triumphal Gate, Ottavia-Rome to migrate the design approach from the centre to the suburbs, without using mimetic attitudes or replying urban structures, trying instead to replicate the same kind of approach used within a central area on a suburban site. The same attention to the different layers of significance, through centuries, was adopted to create urban meanings in the roman suburbs. The design process adopted can be formalized in this sequence 1) land reading: instruments to read the territory 2) land writing : instruments to write on the territory 3) a new system of peripheral centralities: metropolitan gates 4) the social interrogation: the ideas of the inhabitants 5) building a textual semantic universe as reference for the design process: formal analysis 6) building the form: composition