31 Dec From Roma with Love!
The Catholic Church is celebrating the “Holy Year” in 2025. Pope Francis began the jubilee year on Christmas Eve with the opening of the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica. The Vatican is expecting around 45 million pilgrims and visitors to come to Rome. The motto of the year is “Pilgrims of Hope”.
At the end of 2024, I became a “pilgrim of inspiration”. Rome lends itself to this in every respect and in every context. The eternal city is a testimony to the creative power of humanity in every pore and epoch.
Future archaeology under the sign of hope.
As a developer of places, spaces and real estate with special characteristics and brownfield transformations, the “capital of the world” is particularly special to me. After all, Raphael Santi’s tomb is located in the Pantheon, one of the best preserved buildings of Roman antiquity, which was able to claim the largest dome in the world in terms of internal diameter for more than 1700 years. For 17 centuries, what an achievement. What a place of worship for this creative man!
Santi was long regarded as the greatest painter of all time, oversaw the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and achieved great fame not least with his paintings of the Madonna: Raphael Santi, born in 1483 in Urbino in the Marche, died just 37 years later in Rome, was one of the most important artists of the Italian High Renaissance – and is today, as the blog post The divine Raphael Santi and his autopsy of antiquity explains, my pillar saint of brownfield development.
Magic of the past, desire for the new.
This Raphaelian lesson on the magic of the past, a key discovery for me in recent years, has given rise to the principle of my work on the “brownfields” of this world, the industrial, architectural and historical wastelands that are to be put to a new use in terms of economic and ecological sustainability: Search for the past in the present, thus revealing the template of the future. This fundamental principle of future archaeology, as I would like to call my discipline, leads in its application, according to the thesis, to a future that withstands the touchstones of the prosperous, the good: Modernity and humanity.
Brownfield development always means discovering history, researching origins, creating the future – a transfer to new uses. The new is not possible without the old. 2025 not without 2024. Birth not without death. Life not without hope. Creativity not without inspiration.
In 1833, Raphael Santi’s remains were exhumed in the Pantheon. The painting students at the Academy in San Luca were one day asked to line up in a long row in front of Raphael’s skull, drawing pencil in hand. Could it be that divine inspiration from a skull is transmitted to art students? One by one, they touched the skull in the hope of receiving enlightenment for their own art and that some of the perfection and inspiration that Raphael had in him would be transferred.
Who knows, maybe I am standing in front of the sarcophagus of “Il divino”, the divine, for similar reasons.
Be that as it may,
Grazie Roma, grazie Raffaello.
Un felice anno nuovo a tutti voi.
Modernità e umanità per il mondo.
From Roma with Love,
Chris Müller
