Cultural Centre at Fornace Veschi, Rome

Conceiving Architecture as something capable of restoring people and places to their dignity, beauty and memory. Being able to overcome the fractures of the urban fabric and the identity of a place. The trauma that an area has suffered due to the quarrying activity and the disorder of the building settlements through the years.

The project aims to reinterpret a site of industrial archaeology in a modern key, in total respect of its morphological characteristics and preserving its historical memory, intrinsically connected to it. The trauma suffered by an area as a result of the quarrying activity and of the building settlement disorder want to be overcome through a system of squares in which a partially hypogean cultural centre is set, of which protagonists they are the fluidity of paths and sinuosity of forms. The goal of the first design phase was to achieve an overall plasticity of the project, which characterized a certain dynamism as well as the massiveness of the volumes, and the fusion of elements of urban architecture with naturalistic elements. This is achieved through a search for shapes and materials that marry the nature of the site and act as a bridge between the past and the contemporary. The morphological reliefs of the whole area are extremely characterizing the site, the set of overlaid signs of the clay formations through the years, of the stone quarries and of the carry-over soils due to the extractive activity are the starting point for the design of sinuous lines and for the plastic modelling of the project volumes. the same profiles of the clay quarries and the agricultural terraces with dry walls are of precious inspiration for how to graft an architecture on the slope of a land. the two main roads with their buildings have been taken as an urban morphological reference, following the two directions, the layouts of the vertical planes of the main project volumes begin to fan out, the system of these routes will then interpenetrate. With the aim of creating a continuous path, the previously traced guidelines have been exploited to the maximum, each time breaking them, staggering them, opening them like a fan. The overlapping of the three systems creates a complex system whose protagonists are the fluidity of paths and sinuosity of shapes. The goal of the first design phase was to achieve an overall plasticity of the project, which characterized a certain dynamism as well as the massiveness of the volumes.