Garden cities, campsites, temporary settlements, suburban com- munities, kibbutz. Today, suburban living can be seen as a nos- talgic myth, a dystopia, or a realistic refuge from wars, climate change, and pandemics. From the rhetoric of the global village to the intrinsic values of neighborhood, suburban living fulfills the desire for a pristine environment in which to experience new alliances between human and sylvan realms. This essay tells about a built project for an archipelago of residences, designed by Malfona Petrini Architecture (MPA) long before the novel coro- navirus appeared, when a number of families started to move away from Rome to the countryside of an unpredicted “upstate Rome”. Considering the large number of people involved in this process, this voluntary relocation can be viewed as a social and economic phenomenon. Begun in the late 2000s, it was an anti-urban and therefore unexpected phenomenon, which fore- shadowed what would have happened in the future, in our pres- ent. Over time, this archipelago – of people, pets, plants, homes, and technological gizmos – has become a forest, where it is no longer so possible to clearly distinguish architecture from nature.
Upstate Rome. A Suburban Archipelago
lina malfona
2024-01-01
Abstract
Garden cities, campsites, temporary settlements, suburban com- munities, kibbutz. Today, suburban living can be seen as a nos- talgic myth, a dystopia, or a realistic refuge from wars, climate change, and pandemics. From the rhetoric of the global village to the intrinsic values of neighborhood, suburban living fulfills the desire for a pristine environment in which to experience new alliances between human and sylvan realms. This essay tells about a built project for an archipelago of residences, designed by Malfona Petrini Architecture (MPA) long before the novel coro- navirus appeared, when a number of families started to move away from Rome to the countryside of an unpredicted “upstate Rome”. Considering the large number of people involved in this process, this voluntary relocation can be viewed as a social and economic phenomenon. Begun in the late 2000s, it was an anti-urban and therefore unexpected phenomenon, which fore- shadowed what would have happened in the future, in our pres- ent. Over time, this archipelago – of people, pets, plants, homes, and technological gizmos – has become a forest, where it is no longer so possible to clearly distinguish architecture from nature.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
