When political regimes intend to base their legitimacy on the built evocation of past historical moments, their relationship with the past takes on particular forms, especially when it applies to two cities that are distant in space and time. In this case, it's no longer a question of identifying with a previous state of a place, but rather of a double transfer by which one urban form comes to contain another, according to a principle homologous to that of intertextuality in the literary field, which we can call "interurbanity". As with relations between two texts, those established between two urban forms can proceed by quotation, paraphrase, parody, inclusion, condensation and a host of other figures - as is the case with relations between buildings. What is at stake here is what Gérard Genette calls the "architext", which he defines as "that relation of inclusion which unites each text to the different types of discourse to which it belongs". The semantic and concrete fortune of the elements of Rome's urban form, from the Forum to the Capitol, is a good example.
The device of translating a form over time - one of the forms of architectural intertextuality - involves, depending on the case and sometimes simultaneously, if we use a linguistic model, syntax and lexicon. Recourse to the latter is the most obvious, so easy is it to reduce the history of architecture to that of "styles", of which decor would be the expression, and which it would be possible to "apply" to different spatial forms. But syntax - the way in which spaces and architectural elements are organized - can also be appropriated.
It's as if architects' urge to re-examine - even to the point of replication - is widely shared by regimes in search of available fragments of history, fragments in which architectural forms are invariably coupled with reassuring or mobilizing narratives. Most often mythical, these narratives shared, despite their differences, a common focus on a golden age, the return of which would be made possible through the magic of architecture.
