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“Designing the Sense of Belonging – Theory and Didactics”

Prof. Arch. Ettore Maria Mazzola

The University of Notre Dame, School of Architecture, Rome Global Gateway, via Ostilia, n°15, 00184 –

Rome. archmazzola@gmail.com

«I find myself where I feel I belong. Like a spider, I seek to attach my thread to tradition and weave my

web on it» 1

Designing the Sense of Belonging (Theory)

Our current cities are the result of decades of implementation of the so-called “functional city”,

theorized by the modernist movement after the 1933’s CIAM Congress, which had been held on

the steamer Patris I (Marseille / Piraeus journey).

Still today, when we talk about urban development, even in the so-called “Emerging Countries”,

we run the risk of being attracted by the model of the so- called ʺwestern worldʺ. In fact, we need

to learn from our recent mistakes and from our achievements of the past, in order to re-create a

good relationship between cities and countryside and, (within the cities), between humans and

spaces.

The big business link with multinational housing construction must not be ignored. The debate

on ʺsustainabilityʺ is often about energy used in buildings only, while the costs and the harmful

effects of some industrial solutions, presented as sustainable, are always overlooked.

How much does all of this cost? Moreover, what does it mean to produce, to transport and to

install those technologies, which are not sustainable when the low-cost oil era ends?

However, this is not the only problem! … Starting from 2005, France first, then Sweden, Italy,

U.S., and many other countries all around the world, have experienced violent phenomena

against common goods that, moving from the suburbia, also involved the historical centres.

Different interpretations of those phenomena have been reported by different experts of

urbanism, sociology, economy, political science, etc. Nevertheless, architects and professors of

architecture and urbanism seem to be blind and deaf and persist in promoting the worse

1 From the book of D. Prelovšek. The Profession and the Life of a Man, in Jože Plečnik. Architetto 1872 – 1957, Centro Culturale di Arte

Contemporanea Internazionale. Drums Borromeo 1988, p. 38

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examples of experimentations, in search of a “futuristic” built environment, “expression of

contemporary society”.

Is this policy still possible today? Is it possible to passively accept the kind of “brain-washing-

teaching”, carried out all around the world on the students of architecture? … Alternatively,

wouldn’t it be better to stop, take a breath, and start looking back at the social disaster of the 20th

century’s cities as a “side effect” of the work of those architects, slaves of modernistic ideology?

In December 2005, after the social disorders within Paris’ banlieuses, I wrote an article, titled

“Parigi oggi o Roma all’inizio del Novecento?” for an Italian magazine on political sciences2 … I was

surprised by its great success, even among politicians! Another article, on the same subject,

matched a great consensus after its publication on The ICFAI University Journal of Architecture

on August 20093 and on the Social Science Research Network.

In the article, I asked myself: “do the spirit and the sense of place influence the quality of life of

inhabitants? Is it possible to find any relationship between the reactionary behaviour of inhabitants of the

so-called French banlieuse and the lack of sense of place? The social-architectural evolution of those

quarters, developed in Rome by the Institute for Social Housing at the beginning of the 20th century, gives

us possible answers to the problems of cities nowadays and the improvement in the quality of life. The

quarters, built for the working classes, are considered as the best examples of urban-architectural

composition of the 20th century. The real estate market valued houses, like the historical centre, and the

inhabitants are extremely proud of their neighbourhoods, differently from what is happening in more recent

times”.

My thought is that it is undeniable that the irreverence and vandalism of the suburbs – forgotten

and ignored by centres of power – are the natural answer of those who find themselves as

invisible. The vandalistic acts against other people’s or public property, are the expression of

suppressed bitterness of individuals, vented against something they do not feel as their own, but

identified as a symbol of that power forcing them to live in that way!

In 1918, the President of the Public Housing Institute, Malgadi, in his essay “il nuovo gruppo di case

al Testaccio”4 stated: «It may seem an exaggeration to speak of art in terms of public housing; but the

usefulness of seeking, even with the simplicity required for financial reasons, the achievement of some effect

that will make it appear, even to a modest worker, something different from the old and oppressive house

where he had lived […] Public housing, which, along with a good distribution of apartments, can combine

an attractive outer appearance and is preferred over another type […] where this situation exists greater

care is taken by the tenants in the proper maintaining of their dwellings and all that is in common with the

dwellings of the same district […] A home which gives pleasure is kept with greater care, which means that

2 Carta Etc. n°5, December 2005, pag. 24 - 26 3 Ettore Maria Mazzola, “The Importance of Local Spirit and Sense of Place: Side Effects of the Underestimation in the Modernist

Town Planning” (August 28, 2009). The IUP Journal of Architecture, Vol. I, No. 1, pp. 7-15, August 2009. Available at

the web site of SSRN. 4 See: Ettore Maria Mazzola, “The Sustainable City is Possible – La Città Sostenibile è Possibile”, with Preface by Paolo

Marconi. Editrice GANGEMI, Rome. February 2010;

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it performs an educational function for the person who lives there».

This statement, that it is neither based on ideology, nor on hypothesis, but on the real facts, can

be summarized in one sentence: differently from what happens in depersonalized places, if cities,

buildings and houses stimulate the sense of belonging, inhabitants are proud and respectful of

them!

Indeed, thanks to this new way of designing public housing, there was a noteworthy

improvement in the lives of the residents, and it was not long before the slogan of the Institute of

Public Housing became “The healthy and educational home”5.

If that it is true – as it is – and considering what the utopian socialist Owen, in the 19th century

pointedly said:

«When the bourgeoisie realises that cities have become powder kegs, that revolutionary ideas, not to mention

actual revolutions, are brewing, it will deem it appropriate to act not so much to seek to improve working-

class conditions, as to conserve itself and its power».

Today, in light of what is happening in our cities, we could paraphrase Owen and say:

“when architects and politicians (residents in the centre) realize that congestion in the historical centre is

also due to the enormous masses of people who pour in from the suburbs seeking spaces that have been

denied to them, and that the suburbs have become powder kegs, that revolutionary ideas breed there, not to

mention revolutions themselves, then will they deem it opportune to act, not so much to improve the

condition of the suburbs as to preserve the quality of their beloved historical centre!”

Assuming what has been summarized so far, it seems clear that the criterion for designing the

cities and buildings has to be given a new look, not only in the interest of those who live in those

districts less fortunate than the city centre, but also in protection of that centre.

We neither need to go too far, nor to re-invent the wheel every day ... we simply need to put aside

ideology when teaching and practising architecture and urbanism, and become modest, by

watching behind us, because many solutions that were valid in the past, are still valid today.

Indeed, the “Old World” presents many solutions that have been put aside according to the 1933’s

Athens Charter. The authors of that document excluded from their ʺmodelsʺ those one of many

Mediterranean Countries – millennial cradle of urban culture – and simply defined them ʺwrongʺ.

According to the Athens Charter, those models did not respect the guidelines (ʺdoctrinal pointsʺ)

of the new cities’ town-planning – i.e. the “Functional City” – linked to addiction to automobiles!

Today, after the socio-economic-environmental disaster of the so-called “Functional City”, we can

5 Alberto Calza Bini, the President of the ICP, in il Fascismo per le Case del Popolo (Fascism for the Houses of the People),

Tipografia Sociale, Rome 1927 wrote: « […] the Institute took the greatest possible care to see that the technical – would be

inseparable from the artistic conception for a healthy and educational house. A city such as Rome with superb traditions of art

and beauty requires an architectural dignity that is all the more necessary in this period of civic rebirth […] ».

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recognize that the “functional dream” is a “dysfunctional nightmare”, and we need to act in order to

repair the damages before it is too late!

Designing the Sense of Belonging – (Didactics)

Having been involved for more than 20 years in the didactics of many different schools of

architecture, both Italian and foreign, I can honestly recognize that something has to be changed

in the way we teach! First, we need to put aside ideology, then we need to bring the students to

the real world of practice and of the real problems of cities and buildings, instead of encouraging

them to emulate star-architects, without any respect of places and humans.

Too often, projects developed in universities are merely academic and far cry from realism!

Students, pushed by their professors, generally design oversized “buildings for nowhereʺ, while

what they actually need is just to learn how to design a building and how to design a place, or

how to design buildings that do not need any “explanation” to be understood by the common

people. ... Students need to take their graduation in order to be ready to get to the real practice!

Once again, we do not need to re-invent the wheel, because similar situations, both at an academic

and a professional level, have been already experienced and successfully overpassed … we just

need to learn from those lessons and move forward and this is what I’m trying to do in my

didactics.

By the end of the nineteenth century, ordinary people had become exasperated with the Beaux-

Art approach to Architecture – as often happens with contemporary “isms”. Indeed, Gustavo

Giovannoni observed, at meetings held at the beginning of the twentieth century to set up the

Roman School of Architecture: « […] As for the didactic direction I believe that the wish I have just

expressed will bring us to abandon the Academy in favor of the constructive and practical subject, performed

in all its technical details. Architects must, above all, be builders, and forms must arise from a thoroughly-

understood structure: to do the opposite, imagining abstract composition, an empty façade, the building

that goes from the outside to the inside is an irrational procedure, of which young people will never be cured.

In their professional lives they will build costly, unlivable castles in the air, only because they like the design,

and this will bring curses down on architecture, which is already the bane of the public, technicians and

artists […] »

These prophesies have indeed come to pass!

In 1885 Giulio Magni wrote to Raimondo D’Aronco – who, like himself, had been forced to leave

Italy for the sake of his career – and had occasion to express the need for the architecture of his

time to free itself from the shackles imposed by the Academy: « […] he who has to work finds himself

faced with a difficult choice of paths: whether or not to let himself be guided by reason or as a generalized

feeling obliges him to do […] standing up to unpopularity is certainly heroic and those who feel up to the

battle to be fought, enter the fray with that courage that ensures victory. We younger people, who cultivate

this idea in our minds, must defend and support him with all our strength, eagerly studying with the firm

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will to succeed! »6

Early twentieth-century architects (among which Magni and Giovannoni can be considered the

original sources of inspiration) abhorring the rhetoric of the architecture of their time, set off in

search of tradition. From this they learned that the character of cities came, above all, from the so-

called minor or vernacular construction, which acquired nobility from small details that made it

pleasant even without the monumentalism at all costs of the nineteenth century: the post-Unity

buildings (which they appropriately referred to as human beehives) had standardized large

portions of cities with inhuman, monotonous and characterless volumes. The study of minor

construction up to the Late Baroque, on the contrary, showed them that this had been capable of

becoming perfectly integrated with all the rest. They limited themselves to embellishing a main

door, a corner, a cornice or a roof ridge. Confident in their research, they began to produce new

buildings. These were absolutely modern and integrated with the areas in which they were built.

Once again, DECORUM, forgotten by the nineteenth century, was reassuming its leading role!

Three different projects of my students

As practical examples of what “respect of local identities” means for me, I am proud to show here

three different projects, for three different places, made by my students of the University of Notre

Dame. Indeed, the difference among languages and characters of these projects, and the

consensus they locally received, is the demonstration that it is not the signature of the architect –

with his/her own style – that is important for the inhabitants, but the respect of sense of place and

local identity, in one word, of sense of belonging!

6 See: Ettore Maria Mazzola, “Architettura e Urbanistica, Istruzioni per l’uso – Architecture and Town Planning, Operating

Instruction”, with preface by Léon Krier, Edizioni Gangemi, Roma 2006

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Project for the Urban Regeneration of the “Appio-Latino District in Rome (2014)

The following images refer to the project for Urban Regeneration of the Appio-Latino District in

Rome, developed by the graduate students (Abigail Courtney, Brandon Clear, Caroline

Swinehart, Jingwen Zaho) of my course in Urban Design at the University of Notre Dame School

of Architecture, Rome Studies in the Spring Semester 2014.

Fig. 1 - 2: Aerial View before and after the intervention

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Fig. 3 - 4: Aerial View before and after the intervention

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Fig. 5: View of two Urban Sequence along the main streets of the new District

Fig. 6: Sections of a proposed Piazza

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Project for the Mending the Urban Fabric of Rimini (2015)

The following images refer to the project for Mending the Urban Fabric of Rimini, developed by

the graduate students (Juan Avelar, Sylvana Gomez Mendoza, Rene A. Salas, Richard M.

Tambwe and Isabela Tinana Diaz) of my course in Urban Design at the University of Notre

Dame School of Architecture, Rome Studies in the Spring Semester 2015.

Fig. 7 - 8: Satellite View of the Project Site and Master Plan

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Fig. 9: sections along the proposed railway and road underground passage

Fig. 10 and 11: View of two Urban Sequence along the main streets of the new District

Fig. 12: Piazza del Cardo, near the Railway Station, at the beginning of the underground passage

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Fig. 13: Piazza of the New Town Hall

Fig. 14: Piazza of the New Theatre

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Fig. 15: Piazza of the new University Buildings

Fig. 16: Piazza of the new Church

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The Project of the Students of the University of Notre Dame for Brandevoort (2007)7

The following images refer to the project for two blocks of the New Town Brandevoort in

Netherlands, developed by the undergraduate students (Joanna D. Bea, Tricia M. Bertke; Noemie

A. Brand, Laura C. Bresnahan, Christopher R. De Chiaro, Krista L. Dumkrieger; Melissa Grisales,

Christopher P. Huffer, Kevin J. Kelly, Chun-Li Lin; Thien-An Nguyen-Vu, Kaitlin M. Oʹbrien,

Jonathan M. Olvera, Christopher C. Reidy, Rebecca A. Sigman, Laura A. Van-Batenburg- Stafford)

of my course in Urban Design at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, Rome

Studies in the Spring Semester 2007.

I’m particularly proud about this project, because it was made – under my supervision – by my

third years undergraduate students, after being invited by Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl for a

quick demonstrative project (only 4 weeks), aimed to show local architects how to produce local

traditional buildings, respectful of the place and of the will of local people.

The design was unexpectedly successful: all the houses were built and sold out soon! Today the

buildings and the pattern language we produced has become a model which the new design

teams and others to come must refer to!

Fig. 17: Students’ sketches for the Brabantine’s “Architectural Abaco” (Pattern Language)

7 For more information and images about this project see:

http://www.simmetria.org/simmetrianew/images/stories/pdf/rivista_18_2013_a5.pdf

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Fig. 18: schedule for new frames and windows Fig. 19: schedule for new windows, roof windows and

crowning the façade typical of the region of Brabant

Fig. 20: Block 18 completed, with a view along the Heerenlan of archway for access to the court

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Fig. 21: Block 18 completed, corner building along

Hertogsveld

Fig. 22: Block 18 completed buildings along the

Hertogsveld

Fig. 23: Block 18 completed, View along the Hertogsveld

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Fig. 24 and 25: Block 18 completed, View along the Hertogsveld

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Fig. 26; Block 18 completed, View along the Hertogsveld, the building on the corner where the block turns

Fig. 27 and 28: Block 18 completed, buildings along the Hertogsveld

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Fig. 29 and 30: Block 18 completed, buildings along the Hertogsveld

Fig. 31: Block 18 completed, View along the Koolstraat

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Fig. 32: Block 18 completed, corner view along the Koolstraat and the Heerenlan