Rome Studio

Location: Rome, Italy

4th year studio (spring 2013): 15 weeks

This project began with the Art Urbain competition, completed in a group of three. Our task was to revitalize the previously important medieval Via Trinitatis linking Piazza di Spagna (the Spanish Steps) with the Ponte Sant'Angelo as an ecological corridor. Our scheme aimed to reconnect Rome with its river, the Tiber, by reshaping the river walls to reduce their cliff-like effects, sinking the Lungotevere highway beneath a new river promenade & creating a pedestrian street linking Villa Borghese & Piazza di Spagna to the redeveloped riverfront. Furthermore, we were to each design one of the buildings of a new university in the three vacant sites situated along the riverbanks.

My site is a small, triangular remnant from the construction of the river walls currently used for parking. The program distribution is a library, design studios, professor residences & a coffee bar. Before the river wall construction, streets in the city continued straight to the banks without interruption. To draw back to this history and to tie in to our new riverbank scheme, I continued the street leading up to my building directly through it. This split the project 2 separate masses: one for the residential & bar components, the other for the academic functions of library and studios. Because of the difference in scales between the spaces within, the floor to floor heights & overall scales of both buildings are quite different yet they both use the same visual vocabulary drawn from the surroundings. It has two very different facades, responding to their respective contexts: a transparent skin faces the river to admit daylight & provide stunning views, facing back to the city is much more opaque & borrowing the punched windows and warm tones of the surrounding urban fabric. The two masses share a transparent ground floor at both the river & street levels, inviting pedestrians into these publicly accessible facilities. Above, more private functions are more opaque. Finally, both buildings slant at the cut between them, adding a formal emphasis to the split & highlighting the importance of the connection to the river.