The elective course investigates how Rome’s architecture and the idea of history entwine. “Temporality”, “history”, and “past” are no abstract notions but ingredients of and in architectural practices at all times.

The course will systematically analyze how the idea of the past is framed, conveyed, invented in architecture, and in an architectural discourse, in a series of case studies, from antiquity to the present, which will include buildings, models, drawings, prints, texts. We shall look beyond the monuments and rather hunt for the collisions and cover-ups between epochs in order to learn how architecture uses history strategically and practically. A hypothesis is that materials and media as such contribute to shape the past, not the other way around, combining in a temporal chain we call history. Things that produce the past may range from a strategic use of materials like marble, concrete and plaster to signs, wires, lighting or other simple devices employed to camouflage that ancient buildings in reality have become modern. For one might say that history does not exist other than as a display of the present. By what means does Rome historicize its legacy? How can we say that a building “exist” in the past? When and how do monuments become ancient and for what purpose? Do buildings themselves – their historicity, additions, preservation, reconstructions – in some way structure temporality and the notion of time’s passing?

The course’s aim is to unravel strategies from Roman antiquity to Mussolini’s fascism, to stage, censor, and alter history through the means of building. We have classed these strategies in three groups – materials, mediations, annexations. Each group consists of case studies – one each day – which we will study in depth and that include archaeological sites, buildings, print collections, and architectural texts.