2023 | / Italy / Rome

Science Museum

Since the tender for the area covered by the competition posits the preservation of the architectural memory of the place by largely maintaining the barracks, a different approach is essential.

We believe it is necessary to intervene not with one volume – which would generate an out-of-scale building with a strong impact on the urban context – but by constructing a system of sub-sets.

This segmentation allows to create a fabric and an architecture more pertinent to the human dimension of the building sector.

GIVING SHAPE TO THE VOID: VOLUMES AND DEMATERIALISATION

Giving an area unrelated to this context the function of part of the city. Today the military depot looks like an empty box closed off by a walled enclosure (acting as an insurmountable barrier) that keeps the city out. The internal space, on the contrary, shows a concatenation of “voids” of great charm. Revealing and enhancing the significance of the void: this is key to our proposal that takes shape through an operation of subtraction first, and addition later.

Design Director: Amedeo Schiattarella
Project Director: Andrea Schiattarella
Project Manager: Laura Barbieri
Project Architect: Matteo Molinari
Interior Design: Paola Schiattarella
Lighting Design: Carla Maresca

Team: Vittoria Ghio, Vito Esposito, Eleonora Moro, Mario Schiattarella, Enrico Morleo, Maurizio Fimiani

Consultants: Proge77 (Structures ), Euroengineering (MEP), Liraat Visual (Rendering views), Letizia Martinelli (Bioclimatic Strategy), NONE Collective, Cultural Innovation

Tasks: Concept Design

The “voids” of the public spaces extend deep into the barracks.

The insertion of new volumes into the body of existing industrial archeology buildings occurs without resorting to mimetic devices, but openly declaring the dialectic between historicized building and transformational project. The new is inserted deeply into the historic building, giving it new meanings and a new identity.

We imagined a porous and permeable urban fragment in which the lives of the city and of the museum coexist and overlap.

The compact configuration of the volumes is enriched with cuts, sudden burrows, soaring volumes and new materialities that transform the rigid and repelling mass of the barracks into a lifeful space. The urban landscape is completely transformed. Pre-existence becomes the basis for a rich and complex landscape in which the immateriality of the void and the dematerialization of the volumes attenuate the contrast with the pre-existing.

DIG subtract to allow urban public space to take over pre-existing buildings;
CREATE internal cavities that define squares, public streets and natural and light areas set in the mass of the warehouses. The museum opens to the city. Public spaces overlook exhibition spaces without interruption;
SEEK continuity with the flows visualized by the Viganò Project;
INSERT the new volumes inside the complex. Very simple parallelepipedal structures that recall the stereometry of the surrounding existing buildings to reiterate the need to mend the “urban divide” and build analogous landscapes.
DEMATERIALIZE the new volumes. The translucent skin of the surfaces, that light up from within and the encapsulation in a metal cage, make the contours of the new masses less peremptory and more allusive.

Science Museum

The “voids” of the public spaces extend deep into the barracks.

We imagined a porous and permeable urban fragment in which the lives of the city and of the museum coexist and overlap.

DIG subtract to allow urban public space to take over pre-existing buildings;

CREATE internal cavities that define squares, public streets and natural and light areas set in the mass of the warehouses. The museum opens to the city. Public spaces overlook exhibition spaces without interruption;

SEEK continuity with the flows visualized by the Viganò Project;

INSERT the new volumes inside the complex. Very simple parallelepipedal structures that recall the stereometry of the surrounding existing buildings to reiterate the need to mend the “urban divide” and build analogous landscapes.

DEMATERIALIZE the new volumes. The translucent skin of the surfaces, that light up from within and the encapsulation in a metal cage, make the contours of the new masses less peremptory and more allusive.