 Today we're going to talk about a theme that we've been basically dancing around the edges of throughout our discussion of the Baroque, and that is the topic of urban space. One thing that we've identified when we were talking about Baroque in a general sense is that there is this interest in systematizing things and in organizing things and in designing the whole in a scenographic way rather than discrete objects. And by scenographic I mean like a stage set, like scenery. The image I have up here we'll talk about at length when we get to it, but it is simply a representation of the Noly Plan of Rome showing us the area around St. Peter's. And you can see that this intervention by Bernini here, the courtyard, is really less about the thing than about the space shaped by the thing. Bernini's intervention are a series of little courtyards here, colonnades here that wrap a space. But when you enter the space, your primary response is not to fixate on the little delineation of each column or the quality of stone cutting, but rather to be overwhelmed and amazed by the qualities of the space and the relationship of the space to the church in one direction and to the tightness and the narrowness of the little fabric in the other direction. I just want to backtrack and talk about a great renaissance or let's say mannerist urban intervention, one that we didn't quite get to when we were talking about Michelangelo, but that you have to know because it really is part of the canon. And by canon again I mean the collection of buildings that you need to know because they are so central to the way architecture is thought about and discussed. And in fact this isn't exactly a building, this is the Campidolio, the capital line, and this is an intervention by Michelangelo. And just to situate this thing in space, the capital line is the hill where the temple of Jupiter was located in Roman antiquity. Since the beginning of Rome, it has always been this place where power was centralized, the most important hill among the seven hills in Rome. Throughout the Middle Ages and continuing into the Renaissance, it became the seat of secular government, basically the town hall. Michelangelo gets this kind of messy condition of a rag-tag collection of buildings and irregular topography, and this is the site that he has to deal with. I just want to go back to the image of the Roman Forum and to show you a little bit more clearly where exactly the capital line is situated. We mentioned that it's on a hill, and because it's on a hill, there's this radical shift in ground plane. Below it, immediately below the capital line, stretches out the Roman Forum. And immediately in front of it, in the other direction, you have the extent of Rome moving towards St. Peter's. So not simply, let's say conceptually, does this secular seat of power straddle a line between the two roams, the Renaissance Rome of the Vatican and the Pagan Rome of classical antiquity, but it does so physically as well. And we have mentioned before qualities about the Roman Forum that we admired, particularly the fact that the edges don't quite line up. When you look at an imperial forum, you have really strong, orthogonally disposed space. You have lots of local symmetries interlocking. But the Roman Forum is a loose trapezoidal space with buildings clipped on that begin to fragment. A ramification of that kind of looseness of the space is that the space is leaky. And by leaky, I mean, you don't simply have in your purview buildings on the Roman Forum, but every time it cracks open, you get a distant view. From inside the space of the Roman Forum, you get this view up toward the capital line. Let's see what Michelangelo did. My hunch is it's going to be awfully good because, well, he's Michelangelo. Here's a section showing you the condition of the site, low ground down here, high ground up here, the top of the capital line. There is a church, Santa Maria and Cosme d'Anne, which right over here, that's part of the site. We see it peeling off to the left. And Michelangelo has one building here and another building here. And his task is to somehow make a square out of this. And his strategy is to duplicate this existing building, the Palace of the Conservators, Palazzo dei Conservatori, with a new building that imitates it, the new palace. So you suddenly get Michelangelo taking this orthogonal organization of spaces and canting it into a trapezoid. He's clever, Michelangelo, and he refaces the facades of all these things. By the time we see it in the Noli map, this is what we get. This is his new building, which is paper thin, well, not paper thin, but pretty darn thin. And this is a refacing of the old Palace of the Conservators and a refacing of the old town hall called Palace of the Senators. Michelangelo has done a number of things here, trapezoid. We know that trapezoid is great because of the Roman form. But we also know that it's pretty effective from an earlier urban example that we looked at, the Quattrocento intervention of Rossellino in the little Tuscan hill town of Pienza, where we have palaces canting off on either side and the church in the middle. And in Pienza, one thing we admired about this space was that it played with vision, it played perspectively with how we see things. Because when things are not parallel, it's a fake perspective cone. And your eye struggles or is fooled into reading things in different ways. And we also have noticed that the cracks afforded by the trapezoid allowed us to read the background and the foreground in immediate proximity. Michelangelo is building a lot of that same stuff in here at the Capitoline. The space is incredibly leaky. And leaky not simply in plan, but leaky in section, where we have stairs going down to the Christian church, stairs going up to the Palatine hill, and stairs going down to the Roman Forum. It's this little knuckle caught between all of these different conditions. Michelangelo also decided to organize the paving of this square. And the way he organized the paving was to make this giant, ovalized space. And in the center of the giant ovalized space, he situated a statue of Marcus Aurelius. It's a miracle that this statue, this large, classical bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius, exists. And the reason it exists is that people in the Middle Ages thought that it was Constantine. They thought it was a Christian emperor, so they conserved it. Had they thought it was a pagan emperor, they would have melted it down and made spoons or sporks. All of those things are good. The actual paving, according to Michelangelo's drawing of the Capitoline, did not happen until the 20th century. This is one of Mussolini's projects to make Rome better. And anytime you build a Michelangelo project, you are making Rome better. Here's where you approach it. Coming up the hill, quite fabulous. The tower of the palace of the senators nailing the axis. And all of these symbols of ancient Rome are deployed strategically. For example, just around the corner, we have this thing. It is the she-wolf, and a Truscan statue showing little twin boys being suckled by the she-wolf. This, of course, is the foundational myth of Rome, of Romulus and Remus. These babies have ended in the woods who are nourished by the she-wolf. The thing you have out there now is a copy, but it represents that. At a larger scale, we have something called the dioscuri. And this is another set of twins, castor and pollocks, colossal statues, framing the axis, allowing you to march in. Michelangelo has clever strategies for organizing these facades. He knows that because of the site, these things won't be seen from far away, not simply from the local purview of the square. And so he begins to introduce a strategy of organizing these facades based on the entire volume of the building, not simply based on what one story will give you. There's a term for this, and it's called colossal order. If there is an order, and in this case, a Corinthian plaster order that extends to organize two or more stories, that's a colossal order. And Michelangelo is often credited with introducing the colossal order here at the Campidoglio, at the capital line. It's fabulous. And if you look at things like this central window over here, it gives you a sense of how crazy Michelangelo is, even though this window was probably finished after Michelangelo's death by his assistant Giacomo de la Porta. But it's got all those features that we admired at the Porta Pia, for example, of super redundancy. You want me to make a window? Let's trabeate it. Whoa, let's not simply trabeate it. Let's put a pediment there. Whoa, let's break the pediment with an arch. Whoa, let's stick in some brackets so that there is almost every possible iteration of what it is to support something, superimposed, creating this incredible density, this incredible plasticity, so much so that it almost looks like this is a volume pulling out of the wall rather than simply a flat surround in the wall. And of course, Michelangelo is no slouch ever. And this was observed by Le Corbusier when he was writing his treatise towards a new architecture. Le Corbusier goes through antiquity, goes through the Renaissance, goes through Gothic architecture, and pulls out various examples that are worthy of study. And Le Corbusier's strategy is not get that colossal order going or layer on the different ways of making window in the center, but rather pay attention to proportions. So here we have Le Corbusier throwing regulating lines on the facade of the Palace of the Senators and showing us an organization that he actually begins to use again in a number of his buildings as early as the Villa Schwab, which we'll look at when we get to that next term. Just look at the plasticity of that wall. That is pretty darn good. You can imagine from a distance you really read the colossal order so that these things appear like Roman temples. They don't have all the fussiness of domestic space, but they appear like Roman temples, casting shadows, colossal order reading, and as you get closer, you get a nearer reading. Just wanna show you these slides because it's a shocking thing to see. Can anybody see anything shocking here? Like where is Marcus Aurelius? And I happen to have been in Rome when this happened. I was on top of the Capitol and looking at the Marcus Aurelius statue one day and it is wobbling like this, going back and forth in the wind. You thought this is not good. This is bad. And my response was to get as far away from the Marcus Aurelius statue as possible. And I came back a few days later and it was gone. God had thieves been undermining the connection of the statue to the base. What was going on? And the answer actually was that the real Marcus Aurelius statue was under restoration in some locked building. It was fine. And they had built a styrofoam model of the Marcus Aurelius statue and stuck it there. It was incredibly good. These guys know how to throw fake finishes on styrofoam, but the styrofoam could not withstand the wind. So it kept blowing around and eventually the styrofoam Marcus Aurelius went flying off. And I wish I had been there to see that. That would have been a great moment. But this is absence of Marcus Aurelius. And it seems incidental that Marcus Aurelius is there, but in fact it's not. Because when you have somebody like Marcus Aurelius who is directional, it begins to establish a lot of this displacement along the line, this whole centering progression from the top of the capital line out toward the Vatican, which it engages in this direction. Really quite nice. I mean, the oval Marxist center, but it's a stretched center. It implies an axis. And by turning Marcus Aurelius in this direction, we are moving away from Rome of pagan antiquity and we're moving toward Rome of the Catholic Church. Fabulous. The idea of urbanism, the idea of involving a building in an urban fabric is a fundamental point of departure in Baroque architecture. And they do it in a couple of ways. Probably one way they do it is simply by this attitude toward the façade. We saw when we talked about Boromini, for example, that he had taken such a radical attitude toward façade that façade could be deployed to do one thing toward the city. And there could be quite a different thing going on inside the body of the church. And that's kind of what's going on everywhere. But let's look at some of the older façades, some of the models. This is Vignola's Jezu from around 1568, more or less. And Vignola here establishes what counts as the type for the Baroque façade. And by that, I mean it is this large, overscaled billboard of a façade that has very little direct relationship to the space of the church behind it. And that it tends to get developed with a very plastic surface based on layering. You read a back layer, you read a forward layer. On top of that, there's another layer so that these layers build up and begin to imply volume within the flatness of the façade. If you look at the space that the Jezu is actually located in, and here it is right here tucked into the city, there's no way you can get far enough away to read that façade. You can kind of get an oblique view of it when you're coming down the street. But it is totally playing its own game toward promoting messages at a distance to the city rather than in the near view. If in the Renaissance there was a strong desire to have agreement between interior and exterior that would give you things like, say, Santa Maria della Consolazione, that looks like it was made out of a jello mold. There was such a strong correspondence between interior and exterior. Here, could care less. This is as big as it can be, and the church hunkers down somewhere behind it. It's almost reprising a gothic idea about what the façade is, what the west work is. The west work become a propaganda device to promote the importance of the church. It's also interesting to see the way the façade gets developed. This idea of plasticity of the wall that we discussed last time, and we looked at even more exaggerated example in Borromini, San Carlo, Le Quattro Fontane. But this is earlier, and this is really setting forth a new language. So when I say plasticity of the wall, I simply mean the wall is being manipulated not simply one way, but multiple ways. We have this overlay of palasters, but then we have this carving behind it. We have this superposition of something like a temple and then these little volutes coming down and beginning to engage the building together. It's instructive to look at something like, say, Santa Maria Novella by Alberti, with a similar strategy as at play of putting a temple up on top and getting volutes to connect it down. But in the language of Alberti in Santa Maria Novella, everything is plain or everything is flat. It's being articulated in such a way that you can read the modules, but the surface is an inviolate thing. The Jesuit order was a preaching order. That was one of the things that they did best. And so the design of the church becomes all about an ideal place to deliver sermons. Now none of that centralized stuff that you saw before, although you might say in the expanded dimension of the dome, there is some memory of the centralized space. There is some continued desire to microcosmically represent the great vault of heaven in the space of the church, but not in a way that undermines the ability of this thing to serve for its processions. And the model of Vignolo's facade gets picked up by later architects like Maderno in Santa Susana. This is on one of those roads that 6th to the 5th had built, one of those fake roads going out toward the Porta Pia. And so it has this kind of double engagement, part of it, this low level, and you can see a little bit of the wall right over here, the low level that engages the wall. And so there is a desire to simultaneously be fabric and to be monument. So by holding that string course and pulling it through, Maderno is respecting the continuity of edge, continuity of the wall. At the same time, he's interested in identifying this thing as a monument within the fabric of the city, and so he uses the layering. And the layering is something that builds up incrementally toward the center, kind of flat toward the edge with the plaster, getting thicker with an engaged column, getting thicker yet with two engaged columns so that it's beginning to behave more volumetrically. There's just a comparison between Vignola's church and Maderno's church, and in Maderno's church, the rhythms get accelerated and the plasticity gets increased, I would say. This is a good detail of how the layering gets more and more and more three-dimensional as it moves toward the center. And here you can see how the fake facades, the walls that line the city of Rome, get whipped up into a froth and become a church at the point where Santa Susana is located. And look, no church, it's like a cowboy town almost here. And of course there is a church, but the church and the facade are no longer responsible to develop the same themes. Santa Susana is on one of these roads, marking off toward Porta Pia with these fake facades that were put in place and the facades translate through the body of the church almost establishing a new ground plane and on that new ground plane, ideal temple is situated. This is just to show you how completely autonomous the facade is. And here's another one. These are actually two Maderno churches. One is Santa Susana over here and this one is Santa Maria della Vittoria, the church in which the Coronaro Chapel by Bernini is located. The rhythms vary and in varying the rhythms from far to near to closer, you almost get the sense that the thing is turning in space. If you were to draw a picture of something like the Tempiero, the columns at the extreme margin would be close together, the columns in the center would be farther apart and you would get something as a drawing, as an elevational drawing of a round thing that would kind of look like the flat thing we have here in Santa Susana. Super. Here's another project by Maderno and this was one that he died before its completion. But it's a good example to show you what begins to happen to the type of Palazzo, big urban house during the Baroque period. This is the Palazzo Barberini in Rome and this is just down the street from the Four Fountains. Go to the Four Fountains, start walking toward the top of the Spanish steps and you will find this thing. We'll come back to the elevation, but look at the plan. This is a strange plan, right? Like where's the courtyard? There is this negotiation between the courtyard, which is back here, and an entry courtyard. It's not sufficient for the building simply to be an edge on the street, but it begins to carve out a space. The idea that the building is somehow connected to the surrounding fabric of the city becomes important. There's a space carved out and entry court and indeed that space begins to penetrate the building. There's this kind of loge that tapers down to a big niche as you move in here. Fabulous. Another thing that's going on here is typical of the Baroque and that is the slippy slidey center, the destabilization of the center. If we were to look at a Palazzo like, oh, I don't know, Farnese Palace and we had to say, what exactly is organizing this thing? We would say courtyard, no problem about it, but here there's this kind of ambiguous sliding of space into the interior of the building that begins to promote the expulsion of an object on the garden facade. That's kind of interesting. This notion that there is a pavilionization of edge is something that happens more and more emphatically as you move through the Baroque. By pavilionization of edge, and here's the entry court side, I mean it's not just all about the wall. The plasticity of the wall gets carried further and the building begins to sort itself out into different volumes. You might say pavilion, pavilion center. Pop through so that you get, and this is the garden facade. This little piece pulling out and beginning to individuate itself as a special object on that side. Magnificent. I just want to mention that when Maderno died, the commission was completed by two guys who were working in his office and those guys were Bernini and Boromini. The facade that's often credited with being the first true Baroque autonomous undulating facade is a facade by Pietro da Cortona, the facade of saints Luke and Martin. This is built in the Roman Forum. So it's hard to know what the urban fabric is if you experience it now because Pietro da Cortona did what so many people did in the Renaissance and that is simply built in the Roman Forum. There's lots of stone there, crazy not to build there. This is what it looks like. You can see this idea of the layering that we talked about and also the acceleration of density toward the center so that within the flatness of this facade we have towers holding down a foreplane and then this extreme layering of surface toward the middle so much so that it almost seems like it's bulging. It almost seems as though there is this welling out and description of object even though the thing is really all orchestrated in the fairly thin dimension of surface. Here's the plan of Pietro da Cortona's Saint Luke and Martin and when you see the plan you would be crazy not to say this is an ideal cruciform plan. This is the kind of ideal cruciform plan you get in the Baroque where there's an extension in the long direction so that you can kind of say no, no, no, pay no attention to the center. This is all about axial precession. However, you get no sense from the exterior that you're going to find this cruciform plan on the inside. What you get from the exterior is a sense that a facade is much bigger than the nave, that the facade is this extensive plane and it's kind of interesting I think to compare something like Pietro da Cortona's Saint Luke and Martin to the ideal Renaissance church exemplified by Santa Maria della Consolazione in Todi. You know, both have the nice cruciform plan. Both have a hulking big dome but Saint Luke and Martin presents itself as a billboard and Santa Maria della Consolazione makes every effort to directly express the volume of the interior on the exterior. This idea of agreement of parts and whole, agreement of interior and exterior which was so central to the way Renaissance architecture was conceptualized has pretty much been jettisoned by the Baroque period in the interest of architecture as propaganda, architecture as a vehicle to promote messages which with as much rhetorical strength as possible. And you also get increased plasticity on the interior. Look how moderate the attitude toward the wall is in Santa Maria della Consolazione where flat palasters mark out modules and look at how incredibly sculptural it is in the case of Saint Luke and Martin. This continues, here's another Roman architect and I'm showing you this one because to me it exemplifies the acceleration of rhythm toward the center and the virtual presentation of volume through density and layering. And that's a church very near the Trevi Fountain called Saint Vincent and Anastasio. So Santi Vincenzoe Anastasio by Martino Longhi, the younger. There's just this incredible buildup of goo toward the center so that you really feel the volume pulling out of the edge. And probably the most extreme example of that kind of edge becoming object is Boromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane that we looked at before. So these examples are all how much urbanistic value can you get out of a surface? But in many instances, architects in the Baroque actually intervened in the fabric of the city. And of course doing that, they could get even more power. A good example of that is another Pietro da Cortona Church, the Church of Santa Maria della Pace, St. Mary of the Peace. We already saw bits of Santa Maria della Pace back when we were talking about Bramante's interventions in Rome. Bramante designed this courtyard. It was one of his first projects when he got to Rome. But this facade, this little bit of a tholos slapped onto a church is Pietro da Cortona's intervention. And how do you get to do something like that? And the answer is the Pope gives you permission to acquire land by eminent domain. And when you do that, you just take the existing houses and you chop through them. We see here ghosted very lightly the original line of the streets. Not quite enough space to get a good facade going. And Pietro da Cortona is thinking, how much space do I need? And he reasonably concludes, if I have a trapezoid, I don't need all that much space. If I have a trapezoid, I can begin to create a sense of more space because I'm playing with vision. He cuts this little canted trapezoid for himself and really begins not simply to design the facade as his architectural intervention, but the entire wrapper of this space. You get these little translations of wall on both sides behind the church and this entire space becomes like a forecourt. And I think it's instructive to compare this to a building that we saw before. This is Boromini's Santivo alla Sapienza. And in this case, Boromini had the challenge of taking an existing courtyard and designing the church to be placed in the courtyard. And so the courtyard is fairly tame, fairly domesticated with respect to the hyper energetic quality of Boromini's church. But Pietro da Cortona can really begin to play with a courtyard as well as with the church. We have all of these kinds of slidings and slippings happening in through here with this bulging object really seeming to push the space apart. I think it's also interesting to look at the plan of the church. We have an entry coming in this way that connects to the city. We have an entry coming in this way that connects to the city. And if you remember the Teatro Olimpico by Palladio, this notion of oblique entries onto a space is the way the space of a theater would have been designed. So Pietro da Cortona here is conceiving of the little piazza in front of his church almost as a stage set, almost as a theater. Not simply as a thing that you look at as a theater, but a thing that you move through and that you make entrances and exits in as though you were an actor on the stage. So wacky, this whole facade is bizarre. I mean, it's like he's looking at Michelangelo. He's getting the idea of undulation going on in this flat part in a way very similar to the Luca and Martina that we looked at before. The edge is held by elements that kind of look like towers and then the layering happens. A bulge happens in the middle. The bulge fully materializes itself as the porch pushing out into the space. And then you have to say, well, what is this thing? And to me, that thing looks like it belongs more in the Manorist period than in the Baroque period. It seems as though it is a keystone that has decided to become a dome or a picture of a dome. Or it is a continuation of the game played by flat surfaces in the Baroque period to imply volume within the space of flatness. So maybe this thing is meant to represent the dome on this Tholos-like piece over here, but orthographically, flat, not three-dimensionally. Here you can kind of see the slipping of edge behind volume. Pietro da Cortona is building in a dense fabric. This is just tucked in behind Piazza Navona. It's the densest part of Rome even at that period. It's interesting to see how this idea of sonography or urbanism or situating a building as a piece of the theater set becomes provocative and attractive to architects in the period. One of my favorite strategies used by Bernini is in this town on the outskirts of Rome in this hilly area called the Castelli Romani. And it is Santa Maria della Assunta in Arcia. It looks kind of, you know, a big, lumpy thing. But what's Bernini doing here? And this is the answer to what Bernini is doing here. Bernini is taking this fairly evacuated townscape and building urban fabric. He builds for his building this little concave space. And into the concave space, he builds for himself an ideal centralized domed portico building. And we know by now that everybody wants to build the pantheon. And Bernini, out in this little hill town, succeeded in doing it. I guess he violates the circle by extending an absent. He probably wins the game of no, no circle for me. It's longitudinal. But still, the fact that Bernini felt it was necessary to situate his building into a fabric that to simply make the ideal temple would not have been as useful as making this stage set of a building. We saw the same strategy going on when Bernini was doing San Andrea al Quirinale. That is to say, he carved a space for himself, and the building slid outside the space. And in the case of Ariccia, he carves a space for himself, and the building occupies that space. Probably the extreme example of Bernini carving a space for himself and beginning to somehow celebrate a centralized space is his intervention at St. Peter's, his cortile, his courtyard at St. Peter's. If we look at the Noli map, we see it over here. And it's fairly spectacular as a volume. I mean, look at Rome. This is Piazza Navona. That's pretty big. This is bigger. This is this big, voided space. And another thing that we might observe is that in the interventions put into play by sixes the fifth, you can't get to St. Peter's. St. Peter's is a little bit out of the purview of the path system that's been clearly delineated. This is what St. Peter's would have looked like at the time of the Noli map, which is 18th century, but it shows you the condition that Bernini left it in. Big courtyard packed into this tight fabric of the borgo, the neighborhood around here. And notice access slamming down obelisk in the middle and bang, you cannot proceed through the access. Many people will tell you that when Mussolini blew out this middle stuff and made a giant access connecting this into the system of Sistine roads, he did a terrible thing because one of the great things about the condition of the Piazza San Pietro was how you just discovered it. This tension between compression and expansion. You're walking through narrow roads and suddenly the whole space opens up to you. And that by creating this long axis that was undermined. Perhaps I'm a Philistine, but I think the long axis is just great because if you want to get that experience of compression and expansion, just come in off the side. The bus stops right over here. Come in off the side and you'll get it. What were some of the things that Bernini was thinking about? We already identified the fact that Maderno's extension of the nave of St. Peter's and Maderno's addition of the facade created an awkward condition because the towers that were envisaged for the space couldn't quite be executed. They began to fall down because Bernini was bad at structures. By the way, this is the long view down Mussolini street that you get, which I think is just super. What Bernini does with his intervention is he begins to make a frame so that even though you've been denied the view of the dome by the extension of the nave, he's gonna put you far enough back to see the dome. So by displacing the center of the forecourt this far away, he's suddenly making it possible to read the dome and the facade together again, which is a great idea. So if we're way back here, we begin to read the dome and that is something that we do want to do. Here's a little diagram showing you the relationship of the St. Peter's church and the Bernini courtyard. It's almost as though he just flipped it so that the church is this closed space. You can't get in it all the time. It's not part of the city. It's part of this hierarchically organized series of church spaces, but the space of the square belongs to the people and you can occupy it any time at all so that the spot where the obelisk is located in a sense mirrors the spot where the tomb of St. Peter is located in the crypt underneath the dome of St. Peter's. And there's this very funny stair and many people criticize the stair and say it's too shallow. It's too weirdly proportioned, but what the weirdly proportioned stair does is begin to become a kind of joining piece between the reflection of the space of St. Peter's on either side of the axis. You get this strong sense of edge and if you stand in these specific points and they mark them here, the four columns that make up the cortile all line up and you only see one column. But if you're walking through the space, it's like walking through a forest. Fabulous. Notice also how the space of the cortile ends. It ends like a little temple. So it's almost as though Bernini had this giant tube of temple toothpaste and he extruded out the temple and you get this little temple end. We're moving a little bit farther forward in history, but these are some of the ramifications of the second man principle that Edmund Bacon talked about. We spoke about Edmund Bacon when we talked about the Noly Plan of Rome and Bacon, a city planner of the city of Philadelphia and also urban planner and urban theorist, wrote this book and talks about the fact that urban design really doesn't have to do everything at one moment. And in fact, if it does complete all of its tasks at one moment, you tend to get a kind of bad urban design. You get something like New Albany where there's a kind of innervated vision that represents one moment in time rather than multiple moments in time. The best thing that can happen in terms of urban design is just set a plan in motion and allow history to fill it in. We already saw, looking at St. Peter's, how history filled in the plan or the ambitions of the connection of these things finally got realized as the axis connects to the river and then connects to, right about over there, Piazza d'Anazia. So now let's look at this moment. This is the trident set into place by sixth as the fifth architect, Domenico Fontana. And this is the point where it has to jump up hill in order to get to Santa Maria Maggiore. This is the Spanish steps. And this is really one of the super-duper fabulous pieces of Rome. Has anybody been to Rome? Did you go to the Spanish steps? No? Ah! You should be beaten senseless. Because it really is places that tour buses full of grandmas who were there for five hours go. So you have performed less well than a tour bus full of grandmas. Very disappointed in you. Here it is. And at the time that sixth as the fifth the trident into place, there was not a really good connection up the hill. You kind of scooted in behind. This is how you got up. And that stair still exists. But it's not the great way. What happens here in the case of the Spanish steps is another example of this theatricality or the tendency of the city to be seen as a stage set. Instead of simply having a straight run up, like, oh, I can get up to the top. There I am. You rather have a series of extended landings that become like stages. And quite literally they become like stages because you have people juggling, people walking around with paint on their face, people standing still while sprayed gold. It's very theatrical. And the rhythm is strange because it compresses and it contracts and it compresses and it contracts. And you're constantly experiencing different things. It's really great. Even the way it's situated in the fabric of Rome is pretty interesting. Trident, trident, trident. And the trident hits a grid. And what happens when the trident hits the grid is you get this bow tie of space. Even Piata de España, the Spanish square, is a kind of great urban moment. The point where the cysteine axis hits the Spanish steps is marked by a boat. Here's the boat. The boat is called the barcacha. And barcacha means the really bad boat. And it was designed by Bernini's father, who was also a sculpture, Pietro Bernini. The reason it's called the bad boat is no reflection on the sculpting skills of Bernini's father. But it has to do with the fact that water pressure was very low in this area. So it's hard to get a fountain squirting stuff up if you don't have good water pressure. The strategy was to sink the boat. That the whole idea of the boat is that it's sunken. And if the boat is sunken, you only have to get the water this high. And that's what they could accomplish. So at the bottom of the Spanish steps, we have the barcacha. Fabulous. And from the barcacha, we get this view up the hill. And what do we see? What do we see on top of the hill? An obelisk, right? So we know we're on the right path. We know we're in the right direction. And this is just a view showing you a section of all these different landings that you come to that lend themselves to these theatrical moments within the city. Some of the stuff that I like the best has to do with these moments, which are not full of jugglers and people spray painted gold, but rather simply redirect your view to other parts of the city. And you're proceeding on this very shallow incline so that you appreciate the materiality of the stone and the changing aspects of this topographically complex city. And also, when you're high up, like you are, by the time you get to the top of the hill here, you see Rome in a different way. You don't see the bases of churches. You see the domes of churches. And the city becomes almost like a field with ideal pavilions in it, just the domes floating up there. This church, by the way, is Trinita de Molte. And here we have our obelisk. If you're ever in Rome, it's worth going into Trinita de Molte because it was a Jesuit church. And the Jesuits were these scholars. They were going nuts, playing around with perspective. And there is a series of anamorphic perspectives. Anamorphosis is a perspective that's so extreme that it looks like mush. It just looks like blurry stuff. You have to plaster yourself against the wall and look at it obliquely. And it constellates into a recognizable form. So the interior of this is full of these weird anamorphoses. Well worth looking at. Here's another interesting little moment within the space of the city, also done for the Jesuits. And this is the Piazza Sant'Egnazio by Filippo Raguzini. Here's the fabric of Rome. Thank God for the Noli map. We would never know where we were. Can you see anything you recognize in the Noli map here? Yes? Big round thing, pantheon. Here's the Church of Sant'Egnazio. And this is the square designed by Raguzini. This series of drawings shows you what Raguzini had to work with. So his intervention here is very similar to Pietro da Cortona's intervention at Sant'Egnazio. That is to say, how can we somehow claim the space of the city as a stage from which the facade of the building can be viewed, but that can also somehow project the idea of the Church into the city. You look at the eventual plan. And this is there carving away. Not simply claiming a space, but claiming these nodes within the space, these little ovalized thresholds within the space, so that you get a space that looks a lot more like a stage set, a lot more like the space of the Teatro Olimpico than most moments in the city. You get these dramatic entrances and exits, and you slide in here. And it even does more than that. Because look at the condition of the plan of Sant'Egnazio. It is a nave with ovalized chapels on the end. And if you see the way the space of the square has been configured by Ragucini, it is a direct projection of the space of the nave and a direct projection of the space of the ovalized chapels. He not only has transformed the space of the city into a theater, but he's also made visible the interior of the church in the exterior. And the result is you get some really weird buildings, like this one. This is the little triangle building, probably the smallest building in Rome that has as its function really just making the entrances and exits. All of the facades wrapping the space of Piazza Sant'Egnazio are clad in the same way. So it's a coherent fabric. And these are just some details of those little slots of space that make available entrances and exits. Here's another thing that the grandma's on the bus go to see. Did you go and see this when you were in Rome? Man, what did you do? Were you in a youth hostel just drinking beer the whole time? You have to go back again is what it means. This is the Trevi Fountain. And the Trevi Fountain is one of the great fountains of Rome. And Rome is a city of 1,000 fountains. And this is the greatest of the 1,000 fountains. The original design was by Bernini. And it was eventually stopped at the death of the pope that commissioned it and finalized in the 18th century by Nicola Salvi. It's a great idea. And again, this is so smart, right? You're going to make a fountain. Why not make a fountain that's part of a city? So the very concept of the fountain is building that collapses into rustication that is so rustic it looks like the living rock. That's a good idea. And then have water squirt out of the building. Really amazing, amazing. And you've got these like wild horses inside. And you've got these kind of heroic classical figures all over the place. Did anybody ever see the movie La Dolce Vita? This is a Federico Fellini movie. And I'm just going to show you some film stills from La Dolce Vita. There's a great moment where the lovers, Anita Eckwerk, the blonde bombshell, and Marcello Mastrani run. And Anita flees from him and goes into the Trevi Fountain in her beautiful dress. And Marcello grabs her and says, I love you, I love you. And she says, I love you, too. And that's a great moment. Such a good movie. You should all go out and watch it. But essentially, what is going on in the Trevi Fountain is something that has always been going on in architecture of the Renaissance. And that is it gets its power by making this direct confrontation between a natural condition and a cultural condition. You begin to get a lot of play by how architecture simply cannot hold its own in a world where nature is so powerful, that the architecture begins to dissolve into nature. The contrast between the building, which is a darn good building, and the fountain is rather market because the fountain wins. And this is something Bernini has done in many places. For example, we saw the fountain in Piazza Navona, the fountain of the Four Rivers, where he's very interested in hyper-rustication or in finding a way that things carved by man become like nature. And even in a building that seems kind of boring, like the Palazzo Montecitorio, which is I think where one of the houses of the Italian government is situated. You look at this and you think, eh, Bernini did that. But the language is so, so strange. It is the language of the Trevi Fountain. The window cells become like rough-hewn rocks. Columns collapse into quarried stone. And this is not that Bernini's not succeeding in getting good craftsmen in here, but that part of his idea is making visible this juxtaposition between nature and architecture. And also, part of it is this revelation that material has a power and a strength of its own. And it's the task of architecture to rein it in, but sometimes to allow it to be expressed.