Final

To be honest, before I came to Rome I thought that spending an entire semester here could end up being a big waste of time. At the end of my three and a half months here, however, I’ve been proven pleasantly wrong.

I thought that it would be adequate to maybe do a 2-week summer program here and hit all the famous spots. It could be sort of like a vacation. But once I had been here for a week I realized that there’s no way I could have learned even a fraction of what I did about Rome and the architecture here. I’ve spent an entire semester living, thinking, and breathing this city. If you come here as a tourist, you’re just a part of the background—like a big museum, you just wander around the city pointing at things and thinking “isn’t that nice.” Living here was the exact opposite. I got a chance to experience the city, to see the way the people that designed it wanted it to be seen.

One of the most important aspects I’ve noted about the architecture here—and one that has influenced the work I’ve done in studio—is the layering of the old and the new. I came here with a very strong emphasis on the modern in my work, but seeing the way centuries-old buildings and landmarks just bleed into modern buildings, theaters, residences, etc. I applied that to my work in the studio by designing a building that absorbed a 1300-year old wall without disrupting the wall’s structure. I allowed the wall to become part of the façade of my building.

There are also some places in the city where this layering effect does not work as well, such as Piazzale degli Eroi, that were just as helpful in designing my spaces. I noticed right away that the piazza was terribly structured for pedestrian travel or really any pedestrian activity. It has a fountain but virtually no way to get there. This type of blockage in the flow of the city’s architecture really stands out in a city like Rome that is famous for its piazzas as gathering places for the city’s population. However, the piazza is a good example of a connecting point within the city for drivers and public transport. It links several very important parts of Rome via the Metro and bus systems and is in very close proximity to the Vatican.

I chose to study Piazzale degli Eroi because it was in such close proximity to the residence, but during my time here I got to see many of the other major piazzas of the city. I think a place like Piazza del Popolo is a better example of where the layering of antiquity and modern is successful. Piazzale degli Eroi is a very utilitarian, contemporary type of piazza—it’s only there to serve the purpose of directing and redirecting traffic flow and has no pretenses of being a popular hang-out spot. Piazza del Popolo, on the other hand, has a gigantic area for people to gather, while still effectively redirecting traffic as well as linking pedestrian traffic between Via del Corso and Villa Borghese.

Furthermore, while the piazza itself has a very antique feel and appearance (such as the Ancient Egyptian obelisk at the center of the square), the buildings in the surrounding area—the “Triton” that goes to the city’s center—are a seamless patchwork of buildings from all different eras and epochs. You can buy a watch or a bottle of perfume from a designer store with a brightly-colored sheer metal display in the window, and then cross the street to a church from the 1500s. You can have an espresso in the Galleria and then walk outside and take a picture of the famous Colonna with its intricate carvings. It may feel surreal to be engaging such vast and frequent jumps in time periods, but the architecture in this city has such a linear, temporal appearance to it that it almost rationalizes itself in your head. You can see where little changes in style came along in the differences in molding or the angles used in the facades of the building or the size and scale of the structure, and the sum of these small changes lends reason to their coexistence.

I should say, though, that there are places in the city where this layering is almost non-existent, and in some areas this works. In the walk between my residence and the barbershop, I pass very few buildings that predate the 20^th century. Prati is a wealthy, residential area, and many of the buildings are apartment complexes, small businesses, grocery stores, and the like. However, because there is none of the awe of antiquity (and that sort of weird voyeuristic pleasure of just passing a building thats 700 years old on the street while you’re eating a kebab), I noticed that I engaged the area in a completely different way than the center for example. The people here were the ones I had to interact with on a daily basis. I had to practice my Italian in these stores when I wanted to buy detergent or milk, I had to listen to my barber rant at me for twenty minutes or so while he trimmed my hair. At the end of the semester, I noticed that somehow, after 3.5 months of interacting with these spaces and people, I could finally understand a lot of what this guy was saying to me. That feeling of closeness and comfort in a space was definitely something I tried to apply to my work in the studio.

For my kindergarten project though, I was forced to face the challenge of layering the antique and modern. I was working on a school that had a direct view of the Colosseum. The building I came up with had a very contemporary appearance, but the biggest challenge of the project was making sure the vistas face the Colosseum. It felt it very important to make sure that the kids in my school would be aware of the structure without being distracted by it. I wanted them to engage the structure as an extension of my new building.

Now that’s how you engage a space.