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We returned from the city after four days caught within its ceaseless movement. The city can be known, but only in part – never as a whole. To grasp the city in its totality requires multiple lifetimes no doubt, for Rome, as with perhaps any other such city, is in reality a multiplicity of cities that seem to converge and then separate again. The moments of convergence are most critical for the architect, for there, at that time, in that space, the typology of all urban artifacts can be glimpsed… albeit briefly. The forum of Trajan repeats the patterns of the street and the shop: the realms between which we exchange with the city: we breath in its soot and breath out its desire for grace …the monument that marks the time when the empire was broad, unending, and secured at its navel …the fragments from a myriad of different architectures that are now tumbled together (these fill our portmanteau sketchbooks). The city becomes a repository for our memories: we are at once both an individual and the City. These moments of convergence, now caught in notes taken and sketches made, reveal, if only slightly, the complex fabric and tortured grace of being human and longing for the divine.
Order appears in the most unlikely places, if we can but learn to see. In fact, I have found that the study abroad program has a deep rooted purposes: for us to return with eyes now open.
Having returned from the Rome of republic, of empire, of state, of the cosmopolitan energies of motorbikes and politics, replete with its strange and complex rituals and dance of food and exchange, of streets which play out as theater, of the ambiguity between museum artifact and living, seething, organism… it is now strange to think that we will never leave this city. Like Kavafy's Ithaca, it will remain with us, where it perhaps has always been.
To see Rome is to look through a glass darkly and find our own visage, partially obscured, and somehow caught between despondency and hope…
sketching is not about what we see, but rather, how we see… in short to sketch is to desire. There is a reciprocity here for as the world is drawn into us – through black lines set against the whiteness of the page – so to are we drawn into the world.
To sketch is to organize desire: to form potential out of the matter that we confront; to awaken the possibilities of things unseen. It is as if we seek to form a single rudimentary word. To form a word is to take in the world as breath and cast it out as voice. In this search, the word originates. Our desire is nourished. In this sense, for the architect, to sketch is to desire: the two are inextricably joined. In every sketch that follows this honest search, the world comes into being out of its potential… a potential that exists through our searching, our sketching. And the reciprocal: our desire, our imagination, is formed through this participation with the world – a participation that takes into the hidden nature of obvious things…
At Hermes Cafe in Castiglione Fiorentinio, some of our students can be found sketching… somehow the coffee and the void within the vaults and the view over the valley and Enzo's gracious smile nourish this moment of study, of reverie…
Siena…
Between the buildings, we were contained by the narrow streets where the sky intruded as a knife seemingly cleaving the mass of the city. Along with all of the students, I too was mesmerized by the Duomo. We spent two hours sketching… or should I say, "learning to see" the inside body of this magnificent building: the hexagonal crossing that conjured a mysterious forest of columns and arches; the shift in the nave from one angle to another just slightly deviant from the first – betraying the resistance of soils and the desire to magnify man's fleeting passage from the city of man to the city of God; the horizontal banding that bestowed a sense of compression, of wieight, even as it lengthened the horizontal nave and dematerialized the stone.
I am not sure, but the students seemed to dance in their eyes as we entered the Piazza del Campo for the first time. I still feel like running across the bowl of this most civil space: a slow spiral that takes me alongside the chapel and into the courtyard of the Palazzo Publico where I would meet the sky!
Between the narrow streets and the vistas as we ascended and descended the hills that have birthed this city (I doubt its mythic origin as founded by Senus, the son of Remus, and prefer to think of Siena as birthed by the hills… by the land herself…).
