rOM[AI]NTERROTTA

Sara Codarin and Karl Daubmann

In 1978, a group of international architects, theorists, and urban designers were challenged to re-imagine Rome and its parts unplanned at the time for a speculative project called Roma Interrotta (Interrupted Rome). The project was initiated by Piero Sartogo and Carlo Argan, who was the mayor of Rome at the time. The motivation emerged from the awareness that the urban planning of the city lacked, at the same time, a big vision and the capacity to trigger granular episodic innovations. Carlo Argan acknowledged the difficulty of designers and policymakers to “imagine” the city, which resulted in a fragmented juxtaposition of unsolved contradictions. Roma Interrotta was an opportunity to diverge from conventional thinking and undertake the challenge of designing provocative concepts for unplanned parts of the city starting from the 1748 Nolli Plan, the last cohesive urban drawing of Rome. 

Roma Interrotta served as a precedent for designing a travel experience aimed at undergraduate and graduate students as a three-credit elective seminar that was conducted during spring break in Rome, with an intensive week of site visits. This opportunity sparked a conversation about the significance of international travel for students in 2023 with new modalities for documenting existing conditions of a destination place, traditionally undertaken with the use of a sketchbook. A novel approach to advancing this concept was to encourage students to invest their observations with cross-referential meaning, as was done in the imaginative proposals of Roma Interrotta. The project's most impactful components were not the two-dimensional plans but the perspectival images and collages that envisioned new possibilities and unprecedented scenarios for Rome. This is where contemporary strides in text-to-image AI come into play. 

Sigradi 2023

ARCC 2024

DigitalFUTURES