To speak obviously, Rome is an ancient city. But the naiveté of such a statement would undermine the rich texture that Rome, among its other counterpart cities in Europe, contains from its lengthy and epic history. It remains a modern city born out of emperors, gods, and peasants. A testament to people both contemporary, and older than time itself. Rome amongst many places is not only a city holding the lives and experiences that transcends thousands of years, but is also a place invariably dripping in meaning.

We as Architects, as builders, as decedents from the longest line of master-craftsmen, can only fathom the skill, work, and time of those who came before us. To imagine that these things that merely the city of Rome contains (Saint Peter’s or The Pantheon) puts into perspective what we as human beings are truly capable of. Because in its definitiveness, Rome is a place designed by great architects, and built by human hands.

We respect that Architecture is a human conception, and that is nuances come from the minds and traditions of people. And we understand that the symbols, which adorn these churches, are in their repetition not for ornament alone, but to communicate specific meaning that their creators had intended. It is understandable that these ‘classical’ motifs have fallen to the wayside of a formal game, and that we, in our most contemporary context, have mostly forgotten their meaning, or their relevance within Architecture as a whole. It prompts us to ask how we understand that work that has preceded us, and what our own work will mean in the future, or how we will be understood in the future context of what we cannot foresee.

But if we as students, or as people, beg the question as to how this all effects who we are, how we design, or how any of this is relevant to our lives, we will inevitably arrive at a myriad of answers- all true, false, and deceiving. In this day in age, so much of what we once knew- the Albertian model of Architecture, Vitruvian practice, or the many modern manifestoes of Terragni, Sant’Elia, or even Superstudio,- have made us question our systems of belief. What was definitive is now an odd shade of gray.

Today, our practice as architects has grown to accept that these things once existed, and have lingered, and that it is somehow our duty to respect all of it, while trying to insert our own modern and sometimes irrelevant agendas. In the construction of a kindergarten, an assignment that places us directly into the context of the city-center, we were driven to consider Rome as a palimpsestic entity, and place into its folds a thing for children, who both understand and irregrettably forget the history of the city in which they live. To accomplish this, we take into consideration the archeological dig, the finding of things ancient, and the constant remnants of the past and how they effect our future- that the kindergarten is a palimpsest of developing language, and that the building of anything in Rome most inevitably discovers the ancient city buried underground.

In doing so, the kindergarten adapts itself to and ancient road that once traversed its site- found through an analysis of a Lanciani map (which overlays the modern, ancient and contemporary cities of Rome) and allows this found road to become accepted as a new public place, and reestablishes the ancient street as a place of commerce, meeting, and intellectual trade. The kindergarten makes use of the wall, the paramount architectural feature of the city, to construct a public space within the city, and to separate the spaces of the kindergarteners, as well as bring to light that the wall can become an inhabitable thing, and an element that can exist both horizontally and vertically in order to make spaces (both interior and exterior)

And to all its effects, the kindergarten may accomplish what it has set out to do, but the practice o speculation comes not without an understanding of how these public and private spaces come to be, and why we inhabit them. In some new modern context, the notion of what spaces mean to us is becoming thoroughly less symbolic, and more focused on the feeling of space, and those elements that make it worthwhile, delightful, or enjoyable. Rome contains as few of these shared spaces, among which, Piazza di Spagna is a favorite to appeal to the many notions of meaning, history, and well-executed Architectural practice.

The piazza is a place that brings together these different understandings of how all that we know in the world, and what makes a place or a thing enjoyable for us, is sometimes simply its delight. The Spanish Steps, although a hallmark of the Roman Renaissance, remain today a particularly relevant element in the city. But it is not necessarily something that is designed, something meaningful, or significantly historic in this case, since the steps embody all of those things. Instead, in all of our symbolic searches, the Spanish steps help us to find meaning elsewhere: in our familiarity.

Ourselves as human beings have found new territory in the modern context of Architecture by identifying in our globalized society things that transcend cultural differences and bring us closer to a feeling of home. Oddly enough, the stair is certainly an element that most of the world understands; what it is like to walk, to sit, and to enjoy one’s environment on a set of stairs. The Spanish Steps of Piazza di Spagna are certainly this example of familiarity. They are not any less or more authentic than a stair in and of itself, but offer to many man’s primal tendency to sit on the hill and look out on his surroundings.

We as architects, builders, and makers of things, can understand our lives in the context of all the meanings that we have set forth before us. But in an increasingly globalized world, it is more difficult to communicate these symbolic meanings. We therefore have to understand our elemental nature as people, and our most basic feelings of space whenever we experience something new. It is not something less authentic per se, but the idea that a city such as Rome, and the people who make that city what it is, can find their own relevance, and be able to communicate their own meanings to the world.