(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

In Vers une Architecture Le Corbusier promoted a new “engineer’s aesthetic” and warned of the “horror” of history, specifically that of Rome. Yet the chapter entitled “The Lesson of Rome” features the plan of Hadrian’s Villa on its first page, not as an example of tastelessness, but of the “greatness of Rome,” “the first example of Western planning on the grand scale.” Le Corbusier wrote often about the role of architecture in guiding human movement. He was clear about the need for view axes as found in the plan of Hadrian’s Villa as the necessary motivating factor in the experience of a place. He believed that the most fundamental aspect in the act of arrangement that lies at the heart of planning “is based on axes… the line of direction leading to an end… A bird’s eye view as given by a plan on a drawing board is not how axes are seen; they are seen from the ground, the beholder standing up and looking in front of him.” These view axes are at the basis of the notion of the architectural promenade that was a constant concern of the architect. The valorization of a sequence of images encountered while walking as the basis of environmental understanding thus predates the digital world. It underlies architecture, film, the comic book, and only now the video game. What the computer gives us in based in the past, in human experience. To see what Corbusier saw in the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa is now possible. One can now recreate a sequence of images which would be encountered on a walk through Hadrian’s Villa that a contemporary visitor might have taken. The villa was created for movement through space from one evocative cultural statement to another, each unlike the rest, distilling its society and times into a concentrated array of appropriate themes and symbols. This architecture as gesture, an active element in the mimesis of social structure through symbolic means, can now be experienced not just in the imagination, but through the virtual recreation of bodily experience.