the greatest function of architecture is beyond utility or beauty, or rather
calls for new definitions of both. A function shared with myth. Architecture,
as we have known it there, is the tangible, visible equivalent of myth, cast-
ing off and taking on continually but still keeping all the human time of a
place alive in one organism, and once we have experienced that wholeness of
time we know that it is as necessary to health and happiness as leg-room or
enough food or the proximity of trees. More oldness or more newness in a city
will never quite satisfy us again. The most beautiful building in such a con-
text - frozen in the past or with the sense of quick doom around it - be-
comes somehow unbeautifull; it makes us nervous. A city is not a painting.
Life rubs off on it differently, and requires for it another concept of unity,
backwards and forwards in time, not to offend the human sense too much.

The big mistake about Rome is to speak of the sense of the past,
or the "weight" of the past. The past weighs only where vitality has failed.
It is the sense of the future that suffers when we see old building always
being demolished or about to be regardless of their merit, and it is the sense
of the continual presence of the future that is involved in the beauty of Rome.
If you try to pin down the main sensation of the city architecturally you find
yourself discarding notions of old and new, since they are all there together,
and even, though they matter very much, questions of form and of genius, and
what you come up with is strength, which implies action and therefore the
future. Strength through incongruity: dreadful incongruity, of style, mater-
ials, everything; bits of this and that sticking out of this and that, hun-
dreds or more years apart in their origins; buildings with scarcely a prin-
ciple of design in common making u a unity at some corner or piazza. From
which you deduce, since you know the city's architecture to have some magical

3.

property that you call beautiful - an effect on the eye, in a certain relation to the needs of the whole human being - that whereas congruity is the soul of architecture in any given work, the soul of a city is in the lack of it: assuming, of course, enough periodic taste and talent for there to be buildings worth keeping. Yet even that is quixotic. Much of Rome's best is as gone; much XXXX has been built over until it was unrecognizable; much of what is there is rubble, sometimes with a grandeur of forms still to be seen as in the Baths of Caracalla, but often just chunks of wall standing or lying around to offend the tidy mind.

It would be dangerous to call even those chunks useless. The construction is in depth, the human depth of time, and the fallen eyesore pieces have their part in it, even if it were only to remind you how unsimple a matter it all was and will continue to be. As much ravage and accident as genius went into it always; no simple formula for preservation ever lasted long, and the story is full of villains. It seems that every sin along with all the virtues was an agent in the miracle, including undue or false or crazy respect for the past or none at all. Still the miracle keeps occurring, that something of the building of all the city's time, all its presents and futures, is always there, a giant shabbiness if you like, but comfortable. Not that any old jumble would do; there is a high proportion of great works in this one. But each of those buildings alone, the Theatre of Marcellus or the Palazzo Farnese for instance, or each of their periods alone, could at best have achieved only magnificence. In the larger pattern of time that create for one another they do something far more, making a place in which no nostalgia, no sentimentality over the past is possible since it was never altogether lost; and in which therefore the present can never be altogether disgraceful.

The worst of modern building is absorbed, however improbable that

4.

has often seemed, and the best, judged by the depth of one's response to it,
is made better by its complex associations. Better in kind, since a so much
greater share of our faculties is drawn on for its appreciation. But even on
"pure" aesthetic grounds, if there were such a thing, one could argue for
those juxtapositions, taking for example the easy case of the recent railroad
station, across the way from the church that Michelangelo built in the ruins
of a Roman bath. It most cities the station would be cursed with shock value,
which is never far from irritation; here it takes from its neighbors, and from
the sense of the whole city about them, the blessing of a large propriety.
The city has established its own aesthetics, in time, whereby the old can never
really look dilapidated as perpetual newness always does, and modernity is
never out of place.

And so you come to hover over a certain proposition, among others,
in thinking of the enormous comfort of Rome. It is that a city can be felt as
beautiful only as it is livable, and given the human need not to feel one's
lifetime as a floating particle, it is livable according to the scale in time
of what it can make harmonious.