Resilient Matters: The Cathedral of Syracuse as an Architectural Palimpsest

Abstract

While every material artifact engages with time on various levels, palimpsests stitch together layers from several periods simultaneously. By physically expressing the passage of time, architectural palimpsests explicitly raise questions about the historicity of buildings. These questions concern cultural heritage studies and architectural historiography, and reverberate in renovation projects and design commissions. As yet, in architecture there is no theory that covers in a consistent manner the way palimpsests express historicity. This article approaches the diachronic essence of the architectural palimpsest, starting from the original use of the term 'palimpsest' in paleography. It distinguishes a set of features by which to explore buildings that can be labelled as palimpsests. By discussing the Cathedral of Syracuse through this lens, the article illustrates its various palimpsestic features and shows how an architectural palimpsest can embody resilience.

Editing Cumulated Landscapes: Point Cloud Modeling as a Method of Analysis in Landscape Design

“…The analogy explains the phenomenon of accumulation, but it does not specify the relation that may exist between accumulated residues of older landscape forms. The entanglement physically manifested in architectural palimpsests is more likely the result of a succession of preconditioned states (Ooijen, 2019). Like architectural palimpsests in which residues of old forms are absorbed in the new layout of walls, residues of the former site configuration become part of the transformed landscape.…”

PORTO, AVENIDA DA PONTE. complexidade e transformação

“…Assim, parte do enquadramento desta problematização do território caracteriza-se pela definição do próprio lugar (Schulz, 1980), um território visível e não visível, sobre o qual nos debruçamos para descortinar a sobreposição de diferentes momentos temporais na sua evolução urbana, como se de um palimpsesto se tratasse, e onde essa continuidade se pode estabelecer por relações de forma ou significado (Corboz, 2001;Ooijen, 2019;Rossi, 1966). Interpretar o contexto, a memória e os desenhos deste território permite-nos avaliar e formular novas problemáticas, partindo de uma leitura focada na memória desenhada de mais de trinta 2 Arquiteto Arménio Losa , Projeto de Arranjo Urbanístico da Zona da Sé e dos Paços do Concelho, 2ª Solução, 1939.…”