The City of Sport and Culture

Itinerary

1 – Villaggio Olimpico, Residential districts for athlets for the Olympic Games 1960
(Adalberto Libera and others) 1957-1960
2 – Palazzetto dello Sport, Sporting palace (Pierluigi Nervi, Annibale Vitellozzi) 1956-1958
3 – Stadio Flaminio, Football stadium (Pierluigi Nervi) 1957-1958
4 – Corso Francia viaduct, (Pierluigi Nervi, Adalberto Libera and others) 1968-1960
7 – Auditorium – Parco della Musica (Renzo Piano) 1994-2002
8 – MAXXI – National Museum of 21st century Arts, (Zaha Hadid) 1998-2009
9 – Foro Italico (former Foro Mussolini) – Sporting complex
(Enrico Del Debbio, Luigi Moretti) 1928-1933




Stadio dei Marmi

Guy Debord and his manifesto Society of the Spectacle has been mentioned several times over the last couple of months. The text is a reaction against mass media, commodity fetishism, and the degredation of the quality of social life. On the italian stage, mass media is government propaganda, commodity fetishism is the obsession with historical relics, and the degradation of social life comes about due to the totalitarian regime. This is particularly relevant at the Foro Olimpico, and especially the Stadio dei Marmi. It's a hollow environment built to emulate the ancients and to suggest the greatness of the regime, all through the construction of (false) public spaces/programs, monuments, and iconic sculpture. We are drawn to it today because it is disturbing/absurd...

Debord on spectacle: (roman parallels)

"The dominion of the concentrated spectacle is a police state."

"The spectacle, considered as the reigning society’s method for paralyzing history and memory and for suppressing any history based on historical time, represents a false consciousness of time."

"(The dictatorship’s) spectacle imposes an image of the good which subsumes everything that officially exists, an image which is usually concentrated in a single individual, the guarantor of the system’s totalitarian cohesion."

"The attempts to establish a normative classicism or neoclassicism during the last three centuries have been nothing but short-lived artificial constructs speaking the official language of the state (whether of the absolute monarchy or of the revolutionary bourgeoisie draped in Roman togas)."

On the periphery:

"The self-destruction of the urban environment is already well under way. The explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls “a formless mass of thinly spread semi-urban tissue,” is directly governed by the imperatives of consumption."

On the development of cities:

"Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem of safeguarding class power by atomizing the workers who have been dangerously brought together by the conditions of urban production."

The entire book, Society of the Spectacle can be found here:

www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/

also, in regard to: "you can live without Libera, you CAN'T live without Moretti... go home and google him"

http://www.architettoluigimoretti.it/site/it-IT/Sezioni/Vita/

-mia+ariane