Forward

I began the work that would become this project in 2014 while studying abroad in Rome (which allowed me ample room for independent study), then completed it in 2016 for my thesis year of college. Although I worked on many unrelated projects for unrelated classes in tandem, the stories here dominated my thinking for the second half of my five-year program, and lingered for many years after in my mind. I had an ambition to continue the project after college, but when faced with the option to resume work in 2020 (after completing my Lamb Lies Down comic movie), I decided to not pursue it. Maybe too much time had passed and I had become too removed from my initial inspiration, but I like to think that I simply accepted that the work was from a time that is now over and thus must stand as is.

Below are books about people and the artifacts of their lives. Most of the people hail from a Roman family dynasty known as the Sorte, a clan that was seldom powerful nor influential but nonetheless survived. As with all families, their lives are only known through what they left behind or what others wrote about them, so instead of clearcut biographies you will find a hodgepodge of puzzle pieces, with most missing. Since they were Italian, the writings they left behind were translated into English by a scholar who added their own biases (intentionally or not) to the family saga. The interwoven narratives of the Sorte are scattered across the history of Italy, but even if there were accounts of every member in every generation, it would still not capture everything that makes them real and makes their country and city unique. Still, with each new artifact one can peek a little more of the impossible whole, building a point of view that is wider than the eye allows; a parallax that lets one glimpse an obscured object.

The concept of a literary parallax is important to this work not just because it speaks to the relationship of time/history, but also to the inherent qualities of architecture. One cannot understand a piece of architecture all at once, rather it requires study of plans, sections, elevations, 3d models, the physical space itself, etc. etc. Even if one takes in all this info, the mind struggles to hold it all in one place, juggling pieces of information back and forth in a blur of understanding, like an eye darting between objects of focus and objects in the periphery. Think of this when reading what follows to glimpse the unseen whole.

Architecture and urban design are inextricably linked with the cultural fabric of place and time; creating a building requires understanding not only its present context, but also its past and future. This relational, empathetic space is built upon a collective chronicle that is never complete and often unreliable, requiring a designer to find an acceptable level of tolerance (in the construction sense), to say “this is good enough.” If we consider time as an analog stream, unbroken and infinitely divisible, then history is a digital science, relying on the interpretation of partitions taken at appropriate intervals (extant artifacts) that inevitably lead to some loss of information. History tries to fit a curve to time that is a good match, but it can never make one that is perfect. But since our eyes and mind can never process everything everywhere all at once anyway, there is no shame in relying on digital approximations to get the gist of an idea, a space, or a person. The higher the fidelity (more frequent partitions at smaller intervals), the more accurate the approximation, but it is truly up to each individual to decide what level of accuracy is “good enough.”

The above paragraphs probably read very seriously, since they throw around big words and ideas with aplomb, so it may come as a surprise that within the text themselves are a lot of silly jokes and dirty images (viewer discretion advised). This is by design. Architecture, at least as it was taught to me, is unnecessarily emotionless and sterile. A division is placed between the built object and the occupants as though it were heaven and earth, fanum and profane, with architect firmly seated in the role of god, predicting all uses yet avoiding all consideration of mess. Honestly, it got quite irritating. I believe that levity, love, lust, etc. all make life more interesting, and ergo can make architecture more interesting, so I filled my thesis to the brim with it. The Sorte are messy, complicated people. They make mistakes, they have vendettas and dreams and waste time on spite and unrequited romance. In other words, they are alive… even if they never technically existed.

To acknowledge the whole truth of the human condition requires a warts-and-all approach, and in that sense I feel my thesis succeeded. The Sorte are nothing but warts. My real gripe is that my final presentation still feels like it would benefit from more family members having their stories told, more artifacts, more everything. As I said earlier, I will not create anything more, but I have my notes for many fun character arcs that perhaps will find another life in another project someday. The following writings/images/etc. have plenty of warts of their own too. There are spelling mistakes, narrative contradictions, and various other small errors, but I don’t think these take away too much from the overall creation (at least I hope not).

The project is organized into a series of books of varying size, which originally were printed objects. For the final thesis presentation, the books were merged into a single volume with a new introduction that provides further guidance into the saga of the Sorte and their English translator Martin Alan Hable. However, I do not recommend reading the books in the thesis volume, since they are organized in an absurd fashion, with left-hand and right-hand pages running two different stories simultaneously. While this adds to my pursuit of non-linearity, it makes reading the books a chore. Below is my recommendation for reading order (click on the black buttons to open each book’s PDF), but if you want all can be read in the Thesis Book PDF alone.

1. Read the Introduction of the Thesis Book

2. Read in any order all other books except L’ordine

3. Read L’ordine last, and perhaps try out a round of the ritual it describes for yourself (if inclined)

Final note: the books were laid out for printing, so they often work best when viewed as two-page spreads. I recommend opening the PDFs in Acrobat, where they should default to a Two Up (Cover Page) page layout, for ease of reading.