The Endless Foundation

This paper examines the foundation of Rome by dealing with Romulus, the Founder, as if he was a contemporary architect who can help us in facing some important problems of our settlements. Contemporary cities are often unfounded because their public spaces have lost any relations with the architecture of Earth. The paper thesis is that foundation produces an architectural representation of the geomorphological features of the founded site and that this representation is technically developed within the cartographic space of the architectural design. Through the tudies of Andrea Carandini about the foundation of Rome and the thought of Michel Serres about the idea of foundation in the western world, the paper affirms the necessity of re-thinking the role of foundation as a project that returns many times during the life of the settlements (“like a refrain”, writes Serres) and that every time describes the architecture of the Earth. Like the sprawled villages that constituted archaic Rome, our sprawled settlements can be re-designed by means of a project of foundation able to attribute an identifying value to public spaces. In analogy with the identifying descriptions” proposed by Alberto Magnaghi, public spaces can become architectural descriptions of those geomorphological features of places that enhance the identity of the communities.