flood plain water: baroque, uncontainable, unfortunately invisible in the modern city
observation | waterloo in rome project by david takacs
fountains roman aqueducts piazzas
expression celebration
1 R C Harris Water Filtration Plant Filter Gallery, 1932-41, Toronto 2 The Tiber in flood. This photo, one of my inspirations, was on the wall of a café I used to visit everyday. 3 Alicante University Museum by Alfredo Payá Benedito, 1998. 4-6 The Mausoleum of Au- gustus, the site of my piazza redevelopment project. The treed centre becomes an island during the day and reverts to being a piazza at night, showing how mutable and malleable water can be in the urban environment.
I recently spent a term in Rome discovering not only its history of Emperors and Popes, but also water. I could immediately feel the physical place that water occupied in the city. A public fountain provided drinking water in the small street next to my apartment; close by were the ruins of a thermae . Rome never had much water, yet great efforts were made to provide it to the entire city and to celebrate it – on the banks of the Tiber, in fountains, in aqueducts and sewers, and the thermae . In Rome water is both scarce and everywhere, exactly opposite to Canada where it is plenti- ful, but often invisible. Even at a lake cottage, water is only a means to recreation — there is little sense of mystery in such a relationship. We only notice water when something goes wrong, such as the E. coli contaminations in Walkerton and boil-water advisories on na- tive reserves. The Harris filtration plant in Toronto is a glorious exception to the rule of water thoughtlessness. It celebrates water in enormous pools framed by bold classical ar- chitecture: water here is something truly pre- cious. In this sense, the Harris filtration plant is a Roman building.
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Throughout Rome’s history, architectural genius articulated and celebrated water: it told of the origin of the community on the Tiber Is- land, shown sailing through the river like the ship the ancients thought it to be. Fountains that provided clean water to the city spouted wild and noisy currents, reaching for great- ness by glorifying water. Bold and monumen- tal aqueducts and that most ancient of sewers, the Cloaca Maxima, served as an embodiment of civic and political power: the ability to pro- vide clean water was in the Roman republic the hallmark of good and responsible govern- ment. And water was the principal building material in the steam-filled, atmospheric haze of the thermae. ‘Material is endless’ states Peter Zumthor in his aptly titled book Atmo- spheres , and water is no different. It can lie flat and still, or run with a current. It can fall down or spring up, over great distances. It can reflect and refract not only the sun’s rays, but anything placed behind or around it. Zumthor rediscovered what the Romans already knew when he recreated the Roman thermae in the thermal baths at Vals, Switzerland.
Rome also knew to fear water. It ravaged the city in annual floods until engineers devel- oped practical flood control solutions, trans- forming mystery to be pondered into a prob- lem to be solved. Modern Rome has almost pushed water out of its consciousness.Water as a building material in the thermae ceased when Christianity condemned the lazy hedo- nism of the baths. With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the idea that good govern- ment applied first to the material world, aque- ducts and sewers lost their symbolic function. Under the Popes, water’s remaining symbolic function was in baptism, and for many centu- ries since, water has been seen as simply an in- frastructure problem. Fountains, that in their Baroque plenitude had celebrated the fullness of water as a source of life, had no place in the clean lines that arched from the neoclassical to the modern where still, geometric pools of water were locked in landscaped gardens. The final blow arrived with the construction, be- tween 1876 and 1926, of the Tiber river walls, rendering the river, and with it the origin of the city, invisible to its inhabitants.
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