Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 1Permanence can be both of a propelling character, or have a pathologicalcharacter, as isolated and aberrant artifacts, i.e. only as the form of the past.Primary elements are collective by nature:[…] they refer to the public, collective character of urbanelements, to the characteristic fact of public things that aremade by the collective for the collective and are by natureessentially urban. 119Through their importance in the formation and constitution of the city, and byway of their character of permanence, the primary elements are carriers of thecollective memory of a city. In a discussion of the relationship betweenarchitecture and locus, Rossi uses The Roman Forum to exemplify amonument and primary element of fundamental importance forunderstanding urban artefacts: 120 Through history, the program and functionof The Roman Forum has with shifting regimes and modes of productionbeen transformed several times: First a necropolis, then a place of battles andreligious rites, then a marketplace, then a public square and a symbol ofpublic power (and “occasionally the theatre of bloody events”), and todayrestored as a tourist attraction – a monument of the Roman Empire. Butthrough all these changes (which also implied modifications of thearchitecture of the Forum), the particularity of the primary element remainedunchanged:Augustus’ systematization and the enlargement of the centralzone of Rome by the Forum of Augustus and the marketplaceof Trajan, after Hadrian’s works and until the fall of theEmpire, the Forum did not lose its essential character as ameeting place, as the center of Rome, (…) it became a specificartifact within the very heart of the city, a part that epitomizedthe whole. 121Much later, in the middle of the 19 th century, the event of a revolution causedan urge for reading antiquity in a ‘modern’ way. When the restoration of theForum started, it was based on a study, not of the Forum as an assemblage ofsingle monuments, but as a total artefact, as “a permanence like that of Romeitself”. The case study of the Roman Forum can illustrate the complicatedrelation between form and function. Function alone is insufficient to explainthe continuity of the urban artefacts. Form persists and comes to preside overa built work as its functions continually become modified. But also in formthe material is modified. A function must always be defined in relation to119 Ibid, p. 86120 Ibid, p. 119-126121 Ibid, p. 120.62