In the exhibition Roma Interrotta (1978) 12 architecture firms developed proposals for Rome on the basis of the Nuova Pianta di Roma by Giambattista Nolli (1748). The endeavour was meant as a criticism of the nineteenth-century urban development of Rome, when it became the capital of a united Italy. This essay examines the ideas that circulated about Roma capitale among architecture historians and architects, in order to better understand its radical dismissal in 1978. This dismissal, it is argued, was motivated by a Modernist and Postmodernist view of Baroque Rome as the model of the European (capital) city. This view, in turn, is based on a quite narrow and specific reading of Rome’s urban development. As such, it lays bare some of the limitations and weaknesses in the architectural discourse of the 1970s.

Exploring critical practices by focusing on a specific architectural object, Maarten Delbeke reflects on the recently finished Museum aan de Stroom (MAS). The building, situated in Antwerp and designed by the Rotterdam-based office Neutelings Riedijk Architects, houses a particular programme (a museum on the history of the city of Antwerp) embedded in a strategy of city marketing. The MAS can be read, as Maarten Delbeke does in his contribution, as a constructed statement of Neutelings Riedijk Architects’ treatise At Work and as a plea for the importance of an architectural métier.