Temporary Housing in a Permanent Building

The housing of displaced peoples is almost reflexively treated as provisional and marginal, an ostensibly impermanent situation implying an outlying, impermanent solution. Without longer term solutions or the hope of return, though, those provisional solutions often become semi-permanent. Instead, if we recognized the probably permanent need for dignified housing for short term crises, we could better integrate these new members of society; and, we could also repair our self-inflicted damage to historical cities. In Rome, an under-appreciated historical building type provides a tool that can resolve both dimensions: the hospital. The Early Modern hospital’s role serving the poor as well as the sick, its somewhat generic architectural form and the flexibility that that afforded its services, its relatively large scale combined with its urban nimbleness, are aspects of continuity across the centuries that would only be substantially transformed at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when private and semi-private rooms replaced the ubiquitous wards and hospitals became unwieldy, often anti-urban compounds. The Nolli map of Rome in fact shows the interiors of these earlier hospital buildings along with palaces, churches, and theaters, dignifying them as public buildings and useful urban instruments. By rehabilitating this sliver, or bar-building, type for this urgent modern need, we can connect strangers to their new home, while repairing the home itself and reestablishing a constructive dialogue with the past.

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9