Summer School

Lecturer: Giorgio Azzariti (Chair of Theory of Architecture, Prof. Dr. Laurent Stalder)

In collaboration with Sapienza Università di Roma (Chair of History of Architecture, Prof. Dr. Maria Clara Ghia)

Team: Giorgio Azzariti, Edoardo Cappella, Paolo Cabratone, Ema Kaufmann LaDuc

Rome is often encountered through canonical image: a dense heritage landscape, a layered urban palimpsest, and – under the pressure of mass tourism – a city whose historical fabric is continuously consumed. What often remains less legible are the logics through which Rome was organised as a political urban project: displacement and resettlement, land reclamation, and regimes of historical legitimation modelling its territory.

This summer school takes one such logic as its object. In the mid-1930s, fascist rule mobilised an intensive urban plan aimed at binding the capital to a Mediterranean and imperial horizon, both materially and in discourse. Throughout five days, students will traverse this equipped infrastructural corridor, from the city’s northern gate to the sea, reading it as a project of internal and external colonisation. They will grasp how the axis’s devices of territorial ordering have been implemented and at what cost, while tracing how these residues are today variously perceived, ignored, or contested by institutions and everyday users.