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Scholarly Research

Embodied Time in the Urban Artifacts of Rome

Peter Wiederspahn
embodied_time.pdf
Published: ACSA Proceedings 12/15/1998

The educational value for the visiting American student studying in Italy, and in Rome in particular, resides in the temporal dimension of Italian architecture and urbanism. ‘Time,’ as commonly defined, is “a continuum which lacks spatial dimensions and in which events succeed one another from the past through the present to the future.” A temporal dimension of a physical entity like ‘the city’ implies that time, paradoxically, embodies physical form. If, in this context, ‘embodying’ is making the intangible, tangible and perceptible, then “embodied time” is the representation of time within a spatial dimension, in this case, within the form of the city. Embodied time concretizes the history of the city within artifactual memory. This essay proposes a pedagogical structure for illustrating the embodied time within the urban artifacts of Rome that are the consequence of the evolutionary forces of urban civilization.