Tracey Eve Winton
Tracey Eve Winton is an architectural historian, scholar, researcher, teacher, and artist, with special expertise in urban form and public space, symbolism and iconography. Tracey is the 2018 recipient of the NCBDS Faculty Award. "The NCBDS Faculty Award recognizes demonstrated excellence in teaching, pedagogy, curriculum development, and/or innovative project development within the formative years of design students’ education."
Tracey has completed her project Dwellings & Journeys, taking her to sacred sites and urban settings in South East Asia, Indonesia, Mexico, and elsewhere to study various aspects of traditional architecture and urbanism.
She is currently working on a long-term study on the interrelationships of narrative and architecture.
*To hire me for research, teaching, design, or for collaboration, contact only at this email address:* traceywinton @ me . com -- All others including students, please use the email address you already have for me, or FB messenger.
She has a professional degree in Architecture and practised as an architect. She holds a Masters degree in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University where she studied with Alberto Pérez-Gómez, and a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Architecture from the University of Cambridge in England, where her supervisor was Dalibor Vesely.
Her doctoral thesis was titled: "A Skeleton Key to Poliphilo's Dream: the Architecture of the Imagination in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.”
Since 2002 she has been on faculty for the Waterloo Rome Program in Architecture, and is tenured Associate Professor at the Waterloo School of Architecture, where she has taught Design Studio, Cultural History, and Italian Urban History.
General areas of expertise are in iconography and iconology, the forma urbis, Renaissance architecture and art, landscape, and gardens. Current research projects include the details of Carlo Scarpa and the ecology of housing and urban form in developing areas.
Besides her new teaching award from the National Conference on the Beginning Design Student (NCBDS) she is also the recipient of the 2014 Creative Achievement award for teaching from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). Her award winning project was an experimental work of theatre, which she produced every year from 2006-1015 with her second year Architecture students. The final theatre project dramatized the real-life encounter between Antonin Artaud and Jacques Lacan in Surrealist era Paris. In 2016 the school’s director put an end to her popular, award-winning theatre project and so, instead, her students designed and implemented an Alternate Reality Game (ARG).
In 2015 the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada award of a Research-Creation grant for her project "The Architecture of Ritual Gesture: The Courtyard Housing of Bali, Indonesia as understood through its Traditional Theatre and Temple Building.”
In 2014 and 2016 she was fortunate to be invited as Artist in Residence at Arts, Letters, & Numbers (USA) and The Siena Art Institute (Italy) respectively.
FOLLOW MY PHOTOGRAPHY AND TRAVELS ON INSTAGRAM @Space_Odyssey
Supervisors: Dalibor Vesely and Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Address: Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and
Rome, Lazio, Italy
Tracey has completed her project Dwellings & Journeys, taking her to sacred sites and urban settings in South East Asia, Indonesia, Mexico, and elsewhere to study various aspects of traditional architecture and urbanism.
She is currently working on a long-term study on the interrelationships of narrative and architecture.
*To hire me for research, teaching, design, or for collaboration, contact only at this email address:* traceywinton @ me . com -- All others including students, please use the email address you already have for me, or FB messenger.
She has a professional degree in Architecture and practised as an architect. She holds a Masters degree in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University where she studied with Alberto Pérez-Gómez, and a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Architecture from the University of Cambridge in England, where her supervisor was Dalibor Vesely.
Her doctoral thesis was titled: "A Skeleton Key to Poliphilo's Dream: the Architecture of the Imagination in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.”
Since 2002 she has been on faculty for the Waterloo Rome Program in Architecture, and is tenured Associate Professor at the Waterloo School of Architecture, where she has taught Design Studio, Cultural History, and Italian Urban History.
General areas of expertise are in iconography and iconology, the forma urbis, Renaissance architecture and art, landscape, and gardens. Current research projects include the details of Carlo Scarpa and the ecology of housing and urban form in developing areas.
Besides her new teaching award from the National Conference on the Beginning Design Student (NCBDS) she is also the recipient of the 2014 Creative Achievement award for teaching from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). Her award winning project was an experimental work of theatre, which she produced every year from 2006-1015 with her second year Architecture students. The final theatre project dramatized the real-life encounter between Antonin Artaud and Jacques Lacan in Surrealist era Paris. In 2016 the school’s director put an end to her popular, award-winning theatre project and so, instead, her students designed and implemented an Alternate Reality Game (ARG).
In 2015 the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada award of a Research-Creation grant for her project "The Architecture of Ritual Gesture: The Courtyard Housing of Bali, Indonesia as understood through its Traditional Theatre and Temple Building.”
In 2014 and 2016 she was fortunate to be invited as Artist in Residence at Arts, Letters, & Numbers (USA) and The Siena Art Institute (Italy) respectively.
FOLLOW MY PHOTOGRAPHY AND TRAVELS ON INSTAGRAM @Space_Odyssey
Supervisors: Dalibor Vesely and Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Address: Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and
Rome, Lazio, Italy
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Papers & Essays by Tracey Eve Winton
A super abbreviated version of a 15-minute talk given at AISU in Bologna, September 2019. For reference only. The extended version coming when I have time.
The Secret Lives of Architectural Drawings and Models
From Translating to Archiving, Collecting, and Displaying
Session: Drawing Sites
Drawing Out Hidden Depths: Tracing A Path Through the Castelvecchio Courtyard, Verona
“A Castelvecchio tutto era falso…” — Carlo Scarpa
At Verona’s Castelvecchio Museum, Carlo Scarpa drew the architecture he imagined outside of conventions, in a layered, fragmentary idiom, producing images more resembling contemporary art than contract documents. Although he drew over measured prints, his drawings (archived on site) reveal traces of his working process, and incorporate the passage of time and the experience of movement.
How Scarpa drew, in this case by materializing the drawing with coloured shading, both reflects his creative position with respect to knowledge-construction and discloses his reasoning. His drawings offer clues to specific narratives which he embedded into the architecture, and their communicative meanings.
This paper forms part of a work in progress. With Scarpa, my interest lies in the strategies he devises, linked to the ideas of his friend Bruno Zevi, to formulate a modern language of architecture, a kind of architecture that is capable of communicating to its visitors across the entire ontological spectrum, from the conceptual to the material. (Where the ‘material’ does not mean a Renaissance version of the phenomenology of materials, but (due to the implementation of arte povera as a material model) has to do more with texture, craft and finish, as well as process.)
In the postwar era in Italy and USA, artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Robert Smithson, etc. innovated non-mimetic practices that provided the work a ‘space’ of play, in which processes we could call nature, chaos, or entropy, might enter to impact and counter-balance the formal aspects which the artist imposed. This strategy downplayed a work’s or an individual element’s object-quality in favour of emphasizing the processes in which it was materially engaged. [The implication of this mode of thinking is that the work (building, model or drawing) forms a ‘weak’ or provisional center to an ecological context, and it is not discontinuous with it.] [These processes revealed destruction and creation to be indivisible.] The very idea of a connected sequence linked by organic elements with the notion that Frank Lloyd Wright called “continuity.”
Scarpa’s surfaces could be analogical to contemporary ‘action painting’ as described by Harold Rosenberg, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act — rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.” Rosenberg’s critique, grounded in the paradigm shift in modernity from iconic representation to the indexical trace, shifted the focus from the formal appearance of the work to the interaction. In this, the completed artifact manifested traces of how it was made, the act of creation in which the art consisted. This was not just an American model, for important American artists worked in Italy, where Lucio Fontana started slashing canvases in the 1950s.
Still life emerged as a modern painting genre in the early seventeenth century, and by the turn of this century included sculpture as a medium. It originates and defines its limits architecturally, that is, on the near side of perspective’s picture window, in the intimate presence of domestic space, the place of everyday life. Still life or nature morte is empirically constituted by its subject matter. Typically, the raw foods that sustain life and the implements related to them in the domestic scene are presented horizontally on a table-top, the quotidian stage of the private human drama.
Those things which appear in the still life are denoted already at a remove from nature, conscripted into the service of human life. These are not sublime objects of love or veneration from the tradition of art which serves and constitutes religion. Instead, their mundanity limits the potentiality of human relations toward them, and the still life articulates and explores this delimited mortal sphere as the repetitive theatre of subsistence.
Although its objects may be commonplace, their deliberate choice and organization identify them as objects of desire.
In the Library in the ducal palace at Urbino, Italy, the books may have gone, but the story endures in built form.
This is an abbreviated version of the paper intended for publication, but the full-length paper will be uploaded when I have a chance to revise it.
There was only one problem with the viral news story. The news anchor had unknowingly reported on a transmedia fiction. She had inadvertently tumbled down a ‘rabbit hole’ intended for game-players of an Alternate Reality Game designed by my second year architecture students as the collective term project in their Cultural History course. The students, of course, were elated, as they had just discovered at first hand the role of the imagination in how history is made.
In 1602, Campanella wrote A Poetic City of the Sun. The Idea of a Philosophical Republic. His utopian vision, influenced by Plato’s Republic, demonstrated civic justice through permanent geometrical order registered in the architecture of the city, giving new dimensions to the ideal commonwealth genre.
The submitted 500 word ABSTRACT
“…it’s not often that you see buildings being both ripped down and built up at the same time.” — Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque
In 1972 Robert Smithson lectured to architecture students in Utah on his experience of an unfinished and partially demolished hotel close to the important archaeological site in Palenque, Mexico, 3 years before. The artist’s Neorealist slideshow explored an abandoned, episodic edifice, tourism’s muddy handprint, owing its existence to the monumental Mayan architecture that he mentioned only in passing.
Playa del Carmen is a fast-growing city on the Mayan Riviera. The former fishing village is expanding to accommodate tourists, both Mexican and foreign, and its downtown is lined with gated resorts and interspersed with luxury condo development. Outside the tourist zone live people who support the industry and more often simply sustain local economy and culture. In Playa’s remote northern end, part of the city, not a suburb, most of the residents, indigenous Maya, don’t encounter foreigners, even though their economy depends on the trickle-down effect of visitors. Like a new Manhattan, Playa is laid out on a numbered grid. The streets parallel to the coast form Playa’s main arteries. While Avenida 30 is a traditional commercial street without ground-floor dwellings, Avenida 10 (double lanes split by a median) has single and double storeys, with hybridized fabric. Streets are the dwelling places of the collective.
“Also you know that the Mayans didn’t have to quarry their rocks, they just went around and picked them up off the ground., because all the ground is loaded with all this broken rock.” — Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque
On 10 and its cross streets, few buildings look ‘finished,’ and most are a shambles, though my body reads this fabric as comfortable: I don’t feel afraid to walk it alone at night. Smithson famously characterized buildings sites under construction as ruins in reverse, and his notorious Palenque talk really concerned the force of entropy in the landscape of culture. What I see on 10, though, is a built instantiation of mythic thinking, and a high degree of both ground-up and top-down organization — top-down being cultural norms and familiar practices, transparent to the community.
“…the bricoleur [creates] structures by means of events…” — Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
Sustainable development is potentially optimized by adaptive reuse of urban materials, in other words, recognizing how architecture and the city metabolize. So let’s recuperate Mexican bricolage from the performance artists and bring it back to its home in the yard. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, in a book dedicated to his late friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty, characterized bricolage as working with heterogenous elements not preselected for the project. The Mexican bricoleur transforms his litany of oddments into a kind of Bachelardian poetics of space, which materially enfolds, yet at the same time transmits domestic and civic signs. It takes a great degree of social craft to integrate the city with the home by spatial sequencing and articulation, and this takes place around and through the events of dwelling.
This essay is dedicated to Alberto Pérez-Gómez and the final version is published for his Festschrift in a new volume called Architecture's Appeal: How Theory Informs Architectural Praxis, edited by Marc Neveu and Negin Djavaherian (Routledge, 2015)
A super abbreviated version of a 15-minute talk given at AISU in Bologna, September 2019. For reference only. The extended version coming when I have time.
The Secret Lives of Architectural Drawings and Models
From Translating to Archiving, Collecting, and Displaying
Session: Drawing Sites
Drawing Out Hidden Depths: Tracing A Path Through the Castelvecchio Courtyard, Verona
“A Castelvecchio tutto era falso…” — Carlo Scarpa
At Verona’s Castelvecchio Museum, Carlo Scarpa drew the architecture he imagined outside of conventions, in a layered, fragmentary idiom, producing images more resembling contemporary art than contract documents. Although he drew over measured prints, his drawings (archived on site) reveal traces of his working process, and incorporate the passage of time and the experience of movement.
How Scarpa drew, in this case by materializing the drawing with coloured shading, both reflects his creative position with respect to knowledge-construction and discloses his reasoning. His drawings offer clues to specific narratives which he embedded into the architecture, and their communicative meanings.
This paper forms part of a work in progress. With Scarpa, my interest lies in the strategies he devises, linked to the ideas of his friend Bruno Zevi, to formulate a modern language of architecture, a kind of architecture that is capable of communicating to its visitors across the entire ontological spectrum, from the conceptual to the material. (Where the ‘material’ does not mean a Renaissance version of the phenomenology of materials, but (due to the implementation of arte povera as a material model) has to do more with texture, craft and finish, as well as process.)
In the postwar era in Italy and USA, artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Robert Smithson, etc. innovated non-mimetic practices that provided the work a ‘space’ of play, in which processes we could call nature, chaos, or entropy, might enter to impact and counter-balance the formal aspects which the artist imposed. This strategy downplayed a work’s or an individual element’s object-quality in favour of emphasizing the processes in which it was materially engaged. [The implication of this mode of thinking is that the work (building, model or drawing) forms a ‘weak’ or provisional center to an ecological context, and it is not discontinuous with it.] [These processes revealed destruction and creation to be indivisible.] The very idea of a connected sequence linked by organic elements with the notion that Frank Lloyd Wright called “continuity.”
Scarpa’s surfaces could be analogical to contemporary ‘action painting’ as described by Harold Rosenberg, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act — rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.” Rosenberg’s critique, grounded in the paradigm shift in modernity from iconic representation to the indexical trace, shifted the focus from the formal appearance of the work to the interaction. In this, the completed artifact manifested traces of how it was made, the act of creation in which the art consisted. This was not just an American model, for important American artists worked in Italy, where Lucio Fontana started slashing canvases in the 1950s.
Still life emerged as a modern painting genre in the early seventeenth century, and by the turn of this century included sculpture as a medium. It originates and defines its limits architecturally, that is, on the near side of perspective’s picture window, in the intimate presence of domestic space, the place of everyday life. Still life or nature morte is empirically constituted by its subject matter. Typically, the raw foods that sustain life and the implements related to them in the domestic scene are presented horizontally on a table-top, the quotidian stage of the private human drama.
Those things which appear in the still life are denoted already at a remove from nature, conscripted into the service of human life. These are not sublime objects of love or veneration from the tradition of art which serves and constitutes religion. Instead, their mundanity limits the potentiality of human relations toward them, and the still life articulates and explores this delimited mortal sphere as the repetitive theatre of subsistence.
Although its objects may be commonplace, their deliberate choice and organization identify them as objects of desire.
In the Library in the ducal palace at Urbino, Italy, the books may have gone, but the story endures in built form.
This is an abbreviated version of the paper intended for publication, but the full-length paper will be uploaded when I have a chance to revise it.
There was only one problem with the viral news story. The news anchor had unknowingly reported on a transmedia fiction. She had inadvertently tumbled down a ‘rabbit hole’ intended for game-players of an Alternate Reality Game designed by my second year architecture students as the collective term project in their Cultural History course. The students, of course, were elated, as they had just discovered at first hand the role of the imagination in how history is made.
In 1602, Campanella wrote A Poetic City of the Sun. The Idea of a Philosophical Republic. His utopian vision, influenced by Plato’s Republic, demonstrated civic justice through permanent geometrical order registered in the architecture of the city, giving new dimensions to the ideal commonwealth genre.
The submitted 500 word ABSTRACT
“…it’s not often that you see buildings being both ripped down and built up at the same time.” — Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque
In 1972 Robert Smithson lectured to architecture students in Utah on his experience of an unfinished and partially demolished hotel close to the important archaeological site in Palenque, Mexico, 3 years before. The artist’s Neorealist slideshow explored an abandoned, episodic edifice, tourism’s muddy handprint, owing its existence to the monumental Mayan architecture that he mentioned only in passing.
Playa del Carmen is a fast-growing city on the Mayan Riviera. The former fishing village is expanding to accommodate tourists, both Mexican and foreign, and its downtown is lined with gated resorts and interspersed with luxury condo development. Outside the tourist zone live people who support the industry and more often simply sustain local economy and culture. In Playa’s remote northern end, part of the city, not a suburb, most of the residents, indigenous Maya, don’t encounter foreigners, even though their economy depends on the trickle-down effect of visitors. Like a new Manhattan, Playa is laid out on a numbered grid. The streets parallel to the coast form Playa’s main arteries. While Avenida 30 is a traditional commercial street without ground-floor dwellings, Avenida 10 (double lanes split by a median) has single and double storeys, with hybridized fabric. Streets are the dwelling places of the collective.
“Also you know that the Mayans didn’t have to quarry their rocks, they just went around and picked them up off the ground., because all the ground is loaded with all this broken rock.” — Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque
On 10 and its cross streets, few buildings look ‘finished,’ and most are a shambles, though my body reads this fabric as comfortable: I don’t feel afraid to walk it alone at night. Smithson famously characterized buildings sites under construction as ruins in reverse, and his notorious Palenque talk really concerned the force of entropy in the landscape of culture. What I see on 10, though, is a built instantiation of mythic thinking, and a high degree of both ground-up and top-down organization — top-down being cultural norms and familiar practices, transparent to the community.
“…the bricoleur [creates] structures by means of events…” — Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
Sustainable development is potentially optimized by adaptive reuse of urban materials, in other words, recognizing how architecture and the city metabolize. So let’s recuperate Mexican bricolage from the performance artists and bring it back to its home in the yard. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, in a book dedicated to his late friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty, characterized bricolage as working with heterogenous elements not preselected for the project. The Mexican bricoleur transforms his litany of oddments into a kind of Bachelardian poetics of space, which materially enfolds, yet at the same time transmits domestic and civic signs. It takes a great degree of social craft to integrate the city with the home by spatial sequencing and articulation, and this takes place around and through the events of dwelling.
This essay is dedicated to Alberto Pérez-Gómez and the final version is published for his Festschrift in a new volume called Architecture's Appeal: How Theory Informs Architectural Praxis, edited by Marc Neveu and Negin Djavaherian (Routledge, 2015)
The play merges Captain John Franklin's historical search for the Northwest Passage with Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, which is set on board a ship in the Canadian Arctic trapped in pack ice. Franklin's two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, vanished searching for the route to the east, abandoned in Victoria Strait, yet never found.
Historical note: In the years following our production, the two historic ships were finally located (wrecked and underwater) in what is now Nunavut.
Scroll down the list of theatre works for links to videos of the full performance on Youtube.
Our story features Antonin Artaud, whose experience of psychosis later brought him into the hands of one of the twentieth century's most famous psychoanalysts, Dr. Jacques Lacan, for 11 months in a Paris asylum. Lacan and Artaud were brilliant but difficult men, both former Surrealists, both working on problems of language and communication, and soon became antagonists for one another.
The story unfolds as Artaud, working with friends, all major figures of the era, rehearses a new work of theatre based on the early detective story by Edgar Allan Poe that fascinated both him and Lacan, “The Purloined Letter.” This is experimental theatre, modern theatre, as first proposed by Artaud himself: not an after-dinner entertainment, but rather a ‘theatre of cruelty’ intended to ‘awaken’ the audience into an existential experience in a physical language properly theatre’s own expressive form, and an enquiry into the relationship between fiction and reality.
This year, our team tackled the story of Antonin Artaud, the famous dramatist, actor, writer and artist of the Surrealist era, whose experience of psychosis brought him into the hands of one of the twentieth century's most famous psychoanalysts, Dr. Jacques Lacan, for 11 months in a Paris asylum. Lacan and Artaud were brilliant but difficult men, both former Surrealists, both working on problems of language and communication, and soon became antagonists for one another. The story unfolds as Artaud, working with friends, all major figures of the era, rehearses a new work of theatre based on the early detective story by Edgar Allan Poe that fascinated both him and Lacan, “The Purloined Letter.” Experimental modern theatre as first proposed by Artaud himself: not an after-dinner entertainment, but rather a ‘theatre of cruelty’ intended to ‘awaken’ the audience into an existential experience, in a physical language properly theatre’s own expressive form, and an enquiry into the relationship between fiction and reality.
To view the entire drama on Youtube, mouse over the links below to find two video versions, the first filmed and edited by my friend and colleague Terri Boake and the second filmed and edited by architecture student Rui Hu and his crew.
The play was staged in its entirety and in every aspect by the second year class, in the pre-professional architecture program, as the term project for Cultural History IV.
Each summer, second year students from the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, located in Cambridge, Ontario, stage a play as the major term project for their Cultural History course. This year, we are presenting Ilion, our version of the legend of the siege of Troy. The play was created by the Cultural History class of Professor Tracey Eve Winton.
The course is evaluated in two ways: by a series of weekly quizzes on primary text readings, and through a public theatrical production created in its entirety by the second year class. This project has a separate handout and is based on different themes and ideas every year. The course is thematically accompanied by weekly movies dating from the 1970s to the present.
The title of this project refers to the geographical area in Rome, the Campo Marzio (Latin: “Campus Martius”). This was the designated military grounds outside of the city limits predating the Imperial and Late Republican era of Roman antiquity.
As the old city expanded beyond the limits of the Pomerium, the area became its centre and, to this day, is loaded with iconic works and archaeological traces from the antique world, including the Pantheon, Piazza Navona (a planometric tracing of the Stadium of Domitian), and various Egyptian obelisks.
Since antiquity the district has been in a state of perpetual rebuilding and layering, adding an abundance of public space (in the form of piazzas and public buildings) to the city (a circular sample area with a 1km diameter, taken by the authors of this project, reveals an 8.3% surface area of dedicated, exposed public space in the Campo Marzio). It is the quintessential urban district; one filled with public rooms of all scales which lead, from one to another, as a continuous connective fabric.
1b
The title of this project refers to the frontispiece image from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 1762 work, “Il Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma.” In it, Piranesi layers urban fantasy with typological invention in a pseudo-historical collage of the Campo Marzio area of Rome. Referencing the planometric arsenal of ancient Roman architecture, Piranesi constructs an otherworldly image of the Campo Marzio, indicating a few real architectural elements rooted in the period from which he draws. These elements, amidst a field of invention, give geographical bearing and a ghostly sense of reality to this utopian vision of the ancient city.
1c
From the allusions conjured by the title of this project, one could gather that this design for a new park in the Ostiense district might have something to do with urban rooms, an otherworldly vision of public space and the city, typological appropriation, and the thrust by which a formerly peripheral district becomes central to the city it was once only attached to.
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
As an instrumental narrative, this thesis invests in four parameters of architecture that are as much a reflection of my own struggle to articulate the experience of both literally and figuratively moving within the neighbourhood, as they are indicative of the neighbourhood’s propensity for fragmentation and fluctuation through time.
Throughout this work, I have tried to place myself both on and in the moment of crisis between the opposed binaries of the material and immaterial city, and to write the necessary fiction that might allow me to hold them simultaneously in the present."
The title of this project refers to the geographical area in Rome, the Campo Marzio (Latin: “Campus Martius”). This was the designated military grounds outside of the city limits predating the Imperial and Late Republican era of Roman antiquity.
As the old city expanded beyond the limits of the Pomerium, the area became its centre and, to this day, is loaded with iconic works and archaeological traces from the antique world, including the Pantheon, Piazza Navona (a planometric tracing of the Stadium of Domitian), and various Egyptian obelisks.
Since antiquity the district has been in a state of perpetual rebuilding and layering, adding an abundance of public space (in the form of piazzas and public buildings) to the city (a circular sample area with a 1km diameter, taken by the authors of this project, reveals an 8.3% surface area of dedicated, exposed public space in the Campo Marzio). It is the quintessential urban district; one filled with public rooms of all scales which lead, from one to another, as a continuous connective fabric.
1b
The title of this project refers to the frontispiece image from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 1762 work, “Il Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma.” In it, Piranesi layers urban fantasy with typological invention in a pseudo-historical collage of the Campo Marzio area of Rome. Referencing the planometric arsenal of ancient Roman architecture, Piranesi constructs an otherworldly image of the Campo Marzio, indicating a few real architectural elements rooted in the period from which he draws. These elements, amidst a field of invention, give geographical bearing and a ghostly sense of reality to this utopian vision of the ancient city.
1c
From the allusions conjured by the title of this project, one could gather that this design for a new park in the Ostiense district might have something to do with urban rooms, an otherworldly vision of public space and the city, typological appropriation, and the thrust by which a formerly peripheral district becomes central to the city it was once only attached to.
Team: Lorenzo Pignatti, Tracey Eve Winton, Robert Jan van Pelt, Yvonne Popovska, Leland Dadson, J. Martin.
A deep feeling for urban forms is reflected in the powerful Canadian landscape visions of Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris. The austere beauty of his sculptural abstractions shares a language with Viljo Revell's vision for the City Hall and Henry Moore's sculpture known as The Archer. Our proposal to reinvigorate Nathan Phillips Square draws on Harris' poetics to evoke in Toronto's urban landscape his sense of the living land and its mysterious luminosity, and give visible presence to natural ecologies underlying the city.
A GLOWING TRANSLUCENT PLANE
Imagine the whole of Nathan Phillips Square illuminated by a new stone surface, glowing like a plane of translucent ice, flowing almost imperceptibly towards the reflecting pool to recall Toronto's relationship with Lake Ontario. This shimmering glacial plane extends over the whole square, unifying it and furnishing a layered and textured material that invites inhabitation. Lending metaphorical extension to the square's most popular element, the ice skating rink, emphasizes the civic function of popular representation. The topography invites the people of Toronto to gather on this surface, establishing a second centre, and complementing Revell's 'eye of government' by giving the community a sense of place built on collective memory.
In particular, the analysis reveals how the task of designing a museum along the Aurelian wall resulted in a fixed set of typologies of relationship with between the buildings and the wall.