4th Year Study Abroad Steel Competition Project
Group Members: Kira Collins, Kevin Dobbs, Erika Omae, Jacob Stinson
Duration: 5 weeks
Rome, Italy
Design Narrative
The design addresses a dense historical infrastructure, deteriorating site, and build potential, by creating a unique green neighborhood, renewing traffic and commerce at the ancient port, and creating a new industrial steel building that imagines the material in a digital future of information, adjustment, and resiliency. Rome is a city of layers of infrastructure that over time has built people out of natural public space. The project addresses the needs of the city by creating a swath of public green space drawing people to the site, in order to create a new landmark and a pause for the inhabitants. The site near the old port gates has become forgotten over time. The park creates an approach to the museum marked with machines to remind visitors of the past use, Porta Portese is remade as an important transit stop for the city, and the museum revives the port as a site of industry and technological advancement. The museum is a teaching building designed to house old technology and showcase new purposes. Its volumes are assembled around the values of the site, and it pushes what a building can be by cloaking itself in a new system of movable, interchangeable, programmable, energy producing steel panels. In so doing, it continues Rome’s history of reinterpretation and restructuring and takes it toward the future.
Program Summary
The formal organization of the museum is an irregular grid molded around the existing structures, intersected by a volume angled toward Porta Portese. In addition to providing the hierarchy of the building, this mass creates the spine along which major circulations run. Visitors enter through the existing archway into the inner court of the building, then proceed along the major park axis through the main entry under the volume. Moving to the left on ground level takes you past the cloakroom, bathrooms, auditorium, and classroom. At the end of the axis on the north side of the building is the office and research space and the preservation room, which is glazed on the street façade so passersby can see the work being done. Rising upstairs into the volume lets you enter the gallery space, which you circle through and move south, to the other end of the volume. Stairs from this end let you down into the Armory, which houses temporary exhibitions. Under the south end of the volume is tucked the café and gift shop, accessible to the public. The basement under the building contains storage and the large mechanical room, along with the truck loading dock. A specialized elevator runs through the center of the building, intersecting the storage room, entry hall, preservation room, volume, and galleries, making visible the movement of people and machines.