METROPOLITAN CONSTRUCTION SITE

text by Luigi Greco.

To appreciate the flowing of time here in town – not having the horizon available- it’s my use to look into building sites. Imagine the pneumatic hammers striking the milliseconds, the mechanical buckets marking the hours. There are road works that last half a day, the building sites of the subway that crawl from one side of the street to the other for decades, and then the building sites of apartment complexes in the suburbs, with cranes silhouetted against the sky as sundials. Yes, for me building sites are the breath of the city, the metropolis that grows day after day.

Only a few people who are not involved in the working process give them the importance they deserve. A building site is a great place where matter is transformed through the hands of man, an infrastructure is created from nothing. Here in Italy, on the contrary, seen from outside they represent the heaviness of time, the slowness of the bureaucratic system, the aversion that our society has innate to all that is unfinished, incomplete or unrecognizable. In that way the building sites become black holes of the public space, after a while you get used to it as well. For reasons of safety and public health, urban construction sites are fenced systematically, some of them are rendered inaccessible with cameras, barbed wire and alarms.

There are several ways to isolate a construction site. The fence used for the construction of the subway in Rome, for example, is built with a base of reinforced concrete and corrugated yellow steel panels, high at least 2,50m. Can you think of something less transparent? For this reason, to know how the city is made, I am forced to spy through the cracks of fences , to climb and conquer, but I always discover with great pleasure a myriad of freshly brewed apertures, slits, improvised ladders – I really think I’m not the only one.

Observing building sites for an urban planner is like taking part in an autopsy. The veins of the city, holes in the road surface, the skin, the smell left in the air. Maybe you don’t imagine, but just a few meters away from you there is a cliff of 24 meters with a civilian shelter tunnel from the Second World war or something like that, what a wonderful view!

Could a set of intervention on the hoardings articulate a new form of relation between ordinary members of the public passing by and the extraordinary events taking place inside the building site? In Public Works, S. Shankland and A. Sabin do not speak of interaction. For starters we could at least discuss about visual re-appropriation, about restoring the interconnection between noise and construction to give back dignity to process and to manual labor.

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