Abandoned Summer Spaces

Abandoned Summer Spaces During the month of August the congested Eur district in Rome is completely left abandoned by workers and inhabitants. Even parked cars disappear allowing to rediscover the metaphysical principle that the planners, in the late 30's, brought into play to complete this neighborhood. Originally inspired by the architecture of rationalism and loaded with a manifest component of celebrative classicism imposed by the rhetoric of the dictatorship, the EUR represent a unique urbanization experiment with a hybrid personality. It later evolved in a business area and so its most recent buildings. Nowadays the neighborhood is subject to an increment of the speculative offer, which imposes changes in the planning of its spatiality and management. Abandoned Summer Spaces has been selected in the top 10 shortlist of the Sony World Photography Awards 2012 in the professional architecture category. Statement: I decided to start a project about a specific urban area in order to document the flows of its inhabitants and goers. Soon I realized that the best approach was to instead investigate the absence. A congested district like the EUR in Rome is every year gradually left abandoned in coincidence of the summer exodus. The almost total absence of people and cars reveals the linearity of the monumental spaces as they was originally conceived by their planners, resembling the scale models they used to show their visions. The final objective of the project is to seamlessly merge a documentary on social predictability with the exposure of an urban context, describing how it acquires value in a unique circumstance. It took two summers to take all the photographs. They are the result of a waiting for the total absence.