breath
‘breath.’ is a body of work created within a course titled, The Future of Inhabited Form, instructed by Doreen Balabanoff and Stuart Reid. The work was researched and created over the course of one month, while studying at Sapienza Università di Roma and the Ontario College of Art and Design University’s campus in Florence, Italy.
The project brief was to examine the six finalists’ proposals for the Progetto Flaminio competition, and intervene with concepts and ideas of ‘future,’ ‘form,’ and ‘inhabitation,’ into our chosen finalists proposal.
breath. is conceived within the proposal of IaN+.
IaN+ (Roma)
IaN+ examined the neighbourhood of Flaminio as a living and variable entity, which required modification to reintegrate into the urban fabric and flux, of modern Rome, while interacting with the urban shape: avoiding it, invading it, and passing through it.
Stated in their project manifesto, The future of cities is always a careful interpretation of the past. The below cannot be erased, is the one made by preexistent traces and buildings created before our plan. It includes traces and preserves the locations integrity, creating in the existent structure a space generator and in the same time a recognizable place in every single part. It’s a city made of layers more than iconic buildings.
The IaN+ manifesto refers to these plans as the ‘Recovery Plan,’ and is the beginnings of an important process of urban transformation aimed at creating an innovative urban structure and an almost completely sustainable energy cycle.
The site is surrounded by important works of architecture from the twentieth century: the Foro Italico and Olympic Village from 1960, the Parco della Musica by Renzo Piano, and the MAXXI Museum by Zaha Hadid.
The competition called for an urban redesign of a total of 5.1 hectares. Programmes included 35,000 m2 of housing and 10,000 m2 of commercial and leisure facilities, together with 14,000 m2 of public spaces and facilities along with the City of Science,
as being the object of a successive competition for the 10,000 m2 site.
Important notes in the competition were to create levels of ‘almost 0’ energy performance, and for spaces between buildings to be considered ‘nature of the streets.’
The housing crisis broke out before the economic crisis in Italy, however, the existing problems have been exacerbated since 2008. In the 1990’s, as more dwellings became available for rent, affordability problems worsened. Rents have increased dramatically since, and today low-income households are more concentrated than ever before- new social housing settlements are placed in areas that are not well integrated with the cities in terms of transportation and proximity of goods and services.
Figure 4.
Country, Italy. Density, 3313km2. Growth Rate, 0.69%. Area, 1,285km2.
Information from the official website of the city of Rome, Data on resident population in the Italian municipalities.
Figure 5.
Information from the official website of the city of Rome.
Figure 6.
Information from the official website of the city of Rome.
742,000 dwellings are currently rented by social landlords, while of that, 50,000 dwellings are in the process of being privatized. Demand for social housing is dramatically high: about 650,000 households were in need of dwelling in 2015, as 58% of social housing tenants are low-income earners.
Figure 7.
Information from the Critical Housing Analysis: Social housing in Italy: old problems, older vices, and some new virtues? (Teresio Poggio).
Figure 8.
Households are classified as low-income if their members are among 20% of people with the lowest individual equivalent income (the threshold was set at €9,093/year for 2014).
The site is situated just outside the city centre of Rome, running West to East – which is the usual directionality of the wind in Europe. As well the former military facility is situated just East of the River Tiber which aids with a stronger wind flow to the site. If we begin to examine wind as a force of life, we can acquaint it as the first autonomous gesture of the living human being. [1]
Figure 9.
Hooker, Worthington First Book in Physiology For the Use of Schools and Families (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1867) 56
.
Luce Irigaray Ontology of Breath:
Since our day of birth until our day of death, our breathing marks the autonomy of our being. In other words, to breathe is to take care of one’s own life, to create one’s own path through those lives. The entirety of our existence can be fulfilled through breathing. “It is a vehicle both of proximity and of distancing, of fidelity and of destiny, of life and of cultivation […] Life is cultivated by life itself, in breathing.”
Through the application of Irigaray’s philosophy’s onto the Progetto Flaminio site, we can begin to layer the invisible force of nature and the anatomy of the human body. The former military facility embraces the potential of ‘breathing’ through its linear structures and wind directionality.
Figure 10.
Information from the official website of the city of Rome.
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Figure 12.
Information from GFS (Global Forecast System), Earth Null School examining wind movements, speed and directionality.
breath examines Italy's history of laundering and its deeply rooted connection with the wind. Within the housing units of IaN +'s plan, it combines social interactions with common chores through the scope of a "third space"[1]. a 'Third space' was coined by Roy Oldenburg (2000) as a space defined as, "[the balancing of] three realms of experience. One is domestic, a second is gainful or productive, and the third is inclusively sociable, offering both the basis of community and the celebration of it".
Merging both the new methods of laundering, being communal spaces for chores and the methods of traditional Italian practices, breath stimulates life and community in an otherwise stagnant space in the city of Rome.
[1]Roy Oldenburg 2000- Celebrating the Third-Space
Between the barracks on the site of Progetto Flaminio, breath proposes varied sizes of sheets of ripstop nylon to be strung between buildings. As wind moves through the site naturally, it will initiate the sheets to fill like sails, creating a visual of a breath of air. As the spaces between barracks fill the stagnant space with movement and life, breath turns the powerful feeling of wind- into a visual.
“Life is cultivated by life itself, in breathing. This practice produces a distance, an estrangement, a proper becoming that is a renunciation of adherence to the environment. The near becomes one’s own, through air. If breathing estranges me from the other, this gesture also signifies a sharing with the world that surrounds me and with the community that inhabits it.”[2]
[2] Luce Irigaray 1999 "The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger"(22)
moving is in every direction.
environments – installations – narrative spaces
Thomas Schütte: The Laundry, 1988.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. 2014 Schenkung der Friedrich Christian Flick Collection
