This is a companion piece to my essay Corviale and Kowloon found here. For more context, please give it a read before continuing. This piece was written after our visit to Corviale, the Serpent, in rural Rome and . Please read my essay from third year on the building in comparison 

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  Getting off the bus, and stepping into the belly of the Serpent, my heart was singing. It was a moment of circularity which was 3 years in the making, all of the material was coming back to me. As I dashed up the stairs and down the neverending exterior hallways, I saw for myself the morphing dereliction of the building first hand. Home items and furniture extending into the walkways like front porches, old fridges discarded in corners, layers of graffiti in common places (clearly meant to destroy rather than make beautiful), and literal trash or refuse found in hidden corners. I was saddened at the thought that people live here, and don’t have the choice to leave. Corviale still represents layers of dashed hopes, but nonetheless a place of immense import into contemporary urban design and architecture. 

In the context of post-war Italy, the building was in a context of a desperate search and appropriation of open space for living. Thus, when the project left an entire level open, planned to be occupied as a public street full of shops, it was prime area for squatting: not only covered, but structurally at scale for living. One of the drivers of the INA-Casa project was to give the thousands moving to city-centres a place to live, and to remove them from squatting among aqueduct ruins among other neglected spaces. In Corviale, although later in this process, somehow did not expect the reaction which occurred, and the building has not recovered in forty years. It is clear that each aspect of the disrepair in the building is a natural reaction of residents to the environment of the building as it has unfolded over time. Garbage collects naturally in the dead spaces where people do not walk or spend any time, Jane Jacobs could have told us that this would happen. Furthermore, the spotted graffiti is clearly not of an artful intervention, but more of a representation of rage at the austere, blank walls of the building and its general mal-management. 

Yet, within this list of reactions, there is a beacon of hope. There is a documented history of residents keeping potted plants in the exterior hallways, anywhere they fit. In this concrete shell, there is a vanguard of gardeners filling ledges and sunlit corners with bamboo, tomatoes, succulents and more. These gardens serve to break the monotony of the seemingly endless concrete halls, to meekly react to these inhuman spaces. It is sobering, as one brushes through the foliage, it feels like you’re trespassing on someone’s front terrace with plants and small furniture collections. There seems to be no vandalism of such ubiquitous objects, and it is clear this is the more mature, and most common reaction to the un-liveability of Corviale. 

People react actively to their surroundings: we will push back against that which is unnatural and oppressive. Thereaction can be destructive and uncaring; or it can begin to take guerilla agency over the spaces which are so oppressive. I contrast this with the famed Pruit-Igoe developments, and their descent into disrepair being a cultural development which, never had safety enough to develop these practices. But we must also think about the architectural opportunity which the open spaces Corviale has, although terrible the majority of the time, did give some opportunity to use space creatively, something which many giga-developments cannot say. 

The fundamental shortfall of Corviale was its scale. But more so than the awkward architectural characteristics (its random dead spaces, blank concrete faces, alienating scale, and lack of diversity in spatial condition), the fault of the architect was not to foresee the building as a city itself. There was no recourse to treat it as a city, even if the fourth level shopping street had been completed. The modern apartment block is an isolating environment which necessarily feeds off either a lively ground level, or a close connection to a varied and lively part of the city. Furthermore, public space requires a certain care and maintenance which is generally carried out by the city, which cannot so easily be thrown to the side in a private development. The issue with projects of Corviale’s scale, is that they entirely subvert the human need to change and renovate their surroundings to suit their needs, and further alienates them in the monotony of concrete sheer walls. We can see that the residents of Corviale, beginning with the squatters in the 1980s, but now pervading the entire culture of the neighbourhood, took these deficiencies into their own hands as much as they could. If there were proper maintenance and a better understanding of architectural occupation of space in a late modern context, maybe there would be less need for such a reaction from residents. As it stands, Corviale is a lesson to working beyond the human scale: the human scale exists whether it is designed for or not. It will make or break the dynamic of the architecture which it occupies, and if not kept in the design process will surely, and rightly, destroy the design’s intent. 

I left Corviale only inspired. The projects which we see in the future should never look like this, but we can learn from this building in the resident’s recourse to liveability, maybe even beauty. It is an extreme model of what not to do, but more than that, is a representation of how people may react to the unwarranted and underdeveloped dreams of architects. Look closely here.