Project for via dei Fori Imperiali

Each consideration on architectural ruins brings to a reflection on time; and any reflection on time leads to memory value. So, ruins and memory are strongly related. Each memory refers to an unconscious based on the intersection of events, ideas, values and culture; once this unconscious is related to architecture, each result of the sedimentation due to human operations on cities and landscape is translated into memory value. For every architecture period, another one precedes and another one follows; a long lasting period characterized by a figurative heritage in which the new architecture necessarily has a confrontation with the old one. Therefore, archaeology is a knowledge expression discipline; in other words, classifications, orders, catalogues and inventories utilized to study philologically the past that emerges from ruins. A past, which the architectural ruins represent the only visual aspect of a condition that we can just imagine. Because of their innate nature, they don’t give back the entirety of the built environment, but only a fragment of a no longer existing unity, offering just a part of a complete tale of which no one will ever have certainty. But offering us this partial vision, however ruins can demonstrate something really deeper instead of their immanence: they can give back both the formal suggestion and the essential composition and spatial aspect of the architecture they testify