Titolo INSERTO
Typology University thesis
Year 2018
Project site Rome
The research focuses on the possibilities of architectural intervention in the marginal urban edges in Rome: the Roman historical periphery, born with the popular housing and illegal constructions, clashes with the lack of an urban vision for the city. The landscape is hybrid, a landscape of differences, where large natural and agricultural areas are dotted with traces of the past, infrastructures, ruins and archeology, absorbed by the unstoppable expansion of the city.
The research focuses on the possibilities of architectural intervention in the marginal urban edges in Rome: the Roman historical periphery, born with the popular housing and illegal constructions, clashes with the lack of an urban vision for the city. The landscape is hybrid, a landscape of differences, where large natural and agricultural areas are dotted with traces of the past, infrastructures, ruins and archeology, absorbed by the unstoppable expansion of the city.
The former SNIA Viscosa factory, in Rome, forms the border between the Prenestino and the large railway ring. The factory, abandoned in 1955, was purchased in 1990 for the illegal construction of a shopping center: during the construction of the multilevel structure, the foundation intercepted the groundwater.
We have therefore witnessed the birth of a natural lake, which led to the blocking of the construction works and massive protests by citizens to make the area a public park.
The factory itself belongs to a vast catalog of modern heritage architecture, which increasingly raises the question: is it possible to preserve them as monuments? Given the deteriorated condition of the architectures, the project chooses to consider these architectures as part of a continuous historical time: therefore, it does not act as a mere recovery or restoration intervention, but makes the functionalist elements of the factory the ordering principle of a new urbanity.
The outer limit of the forma urbis is the historical wall of the factory, while a collage of residential and service typologies are ordered by the former industrial constructions: the functional agglomerations become urban agglomeration.
The historical wall, an element that defines the marginal nature of the area, is the limit of the urban fragment. It does not follow the scale of the city in front: the project is inserted in the space re-establishing urban relations and bringing the density of the city into the enclosure, on a smaller scale. The industrial compound houses sports equipment that react morphologically with pre-existences and topography. The sports machina and the domestic scale coexist with the environment of the natural reserve of the lake, where the structure of the speculative building, as a contemporary ruin, is an element of a romantic and picturesque landscape.
The gymnasium is inserted into the buildings that housed the chemical laboratories of the factory. The block occupies the entire length of the central road and its facade is the result of a functional aggregation of volumes resulting in a true urban elevation.
The gym combines the three buildings in one space, maintaining the central shed roofing. At the entrances, the building detaches itself from the level of the original façade, forming a urban scenery of six different but connected buildings.
The service building is the limit between the central enclosure, the athletics track, and the other sports fields. The longitudinal element is fragmented into three blocks which are treated uniformly to emphasize its uniqueness. The shed roofing represents the archetype of the building dedicated to production and is linked with the original morphology of the Snia. The building houses changing rooms, squash courts and a deposit. The fields define the space adapting to the topography, forming a dense space thanks to the light volumes of the rope net.
To adapt the inhospitable space of the factory to the domestic dimension, the strategy is to reinforce the limit with the road, grafting buildings clearly detached from the external context, thanks to a logic of density and introversion. The two typologies, terraced house and patio house, face each other on an internal private road. The patio houses articulate the limit with the external boundary, while the higher terraced ones form the buffer zone between the public and the private. Every house guarantees a private garden thanks to an articulation of three housing types.