PREPARING A COLOR PALETTE: WORK IN PROGRESS The buildings of Rione Monti, Rome: an experience between reality and imagination

PREPARING A COLOR PALETTE: WORK IN PROGRESS The buildings of Rione Monti, Rome: an experience between reality and imagination The need to define a color palette for the buildings of the historical center of Rome and, in particular, for the ones of Rione Monti, comes from the need to provide a useful operational tool for the different phases of urban renewal; especially in order to establish a critical and historical reading key for the phases involved in the transformation of a consolidated city. At the same time, we need to create a digital storage system named "Facades in Progress" that will be able to process all the various designers' data over time, to allow workers to simply be able to retrieve it. By reprocessing the data, such storage system can serve to check the validity of the interventions and lead us to go further in-depth, to clarify or to simply achieve artistic "transgressions" that can be useful for the development of a historical memory. Therefore, the storing process should not be rigid and static, but rather a dynamic contribution that allows us to check the evolution of the city's image by storing the data on a computer. This way, it becomes a "poetic" contribution to the historical memory of a city such as Rome. In order to identify the color range that should be included in the color palette, we researched the finishing elements needed for the buildings to help us define the traditional and consolidated aspect of a historical city; by considering how much they were used in the past and how long they lasted over time. Therefore, we were looking for permanent colors and traces of traditional colors that were still present on the facades of the historical buildings. The fonts that were useful in identifying the color range we needed to include in the palette were described in: storage documents, iconographic materials and film material. In particular, the stored documents and the iconographic fonts have provided indications of qualitative nature, derived from the colored drawings of the buildings. These were annexed to the authorization documents and kept in the Historical Storage. From most of the iconographic material retrieved (paintings, prints, pictures, etc.), some significant representations of the historical environment were identified. From this, we acquired information on the traditional color range used to color the plastered surfaces and how to carry out the operation (backgrounds, relief, bases, frames, eaves). This data represents a useful contribution thanks to specific research that can be compared to other data of the field, which can provide accurate indications by means of interpretation and critical synthesis. Standardization, possibility of storage, accessibility and transferability of the information are part of a unique, yet general condition: increased shared knowledge on a past and current urban reality. This is the real objective of our project. Coordination and systematic linkage to all the activities of data storage, building information and achieving representations; all information that will be updated in real time and in parallel with the expansion of the informative base.