Locations - Grandi Terme, Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, Italy

IMAGE: Grandi Terme, pen-and-ink drawing by Natalie Kopp

Our class, Roma XL, was the 40th group of students from Waterloo Architecture to study in Rome under the direction of Eric Haldenby. On a day trip to Hadrian’s Villa, the summer palace of his own design, we were let loose inside to wander, sketch, and feel some sort of inspiration in the same way Le Corbusier did when he visited.

Through time, the villa has been ground down to its more basic elements: roofless walls which vault towards each other without touching, columns stretching up like fingers from the ground to the sky, freestanding doorframes that have lost their purpose. The idea of “interior” is supported primarily by one’s imagination and the spaces where shade falls on the ground; none of these structures is an enclosure anymore.

In places like this, ruins become open-air museums. They can’t be built on because of their historical significance, yet it is impossible to inhabit them as they were originally intended. To interact with a ruin is to wander through it, listen to Rick tell you what it used to be, and insert yourself into the past.

I ended up in the Grande Terme, the “Great Baths,” in search of a cool, shady place to sit. The remains of the roof stubbornly held themselves up in a lattice of structurally questionable forms that cast a patchwork of shadows on the ground, within one of which I found my seat. Although they once had a very different purpose, what I observed was just as interesting: the light had found new ways to trickle into the space through walls that now had openings, and openings that were now double height. Entries and exits were undefined; people drifted in and out between columns and through cracks in the tufa walls.

The baths had become porous in a way that can’t be designed or built, appreciated only by tour groups taking shortcuts and the occasional architecture student.