2.8 The Colosseum valley as it appeared from the mid-1930s to the mid-1980s, with white outlines marking the locations of the demolished Meta Sudans and Colossal statue base as if Mussolini were seeking to convey not his revival of the grandeur of ancient Rome but his power to destroy that which is old, unsightly or […]
Category: Architecture as Experience Radical change in spatial practice
The Catholic Silent Procession
A few years before Emma and Wilhelmina began their campaign for the hearts and minds of Amsterdam, a new annual Catholic ritual had been initiated in commemoration of the city’s Miracle of the Sacrament. Amsterdam’s miracle took place in 1345. It was a standard miracle of the era: the host administered to a dying man […]
Reading two: frontier behaviour on the margins of civilization
A second reading of the wooded islands can be found in the popular detective novels written about the fair. In this penny literature, these islands, like the ‘frontier’ regions of the fair, serve as a site for lawlessness, inversions of proper behaviours and freedom for those who seek it. Certainly, the best-known feature of the […]
The Capitol: lying-in-state
The body of the Unknown Soldier first lay in-state in the Rotunda of the US Capitol. A circular room under the dome, it is the centre of the Capitol and the geographic centre of the District of Columbia. Notwithstanding, and despite the presence of paintings, sculptures and a frieze depicting the country’s history since the […]
Piranesi’s Pantheon
Susan M. Dixon In the famous plan of a reconstructed section of ancient Rome that serves as the main illustration of Il Campo Marzio, 1762, and in a corollary bird’s-eye view, Piranesi offered an image of a Pantheon contextualized in relation to many Imperial monuments (Figures 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3). The Pantheon was one of […]