top of page

GRAND TOURISM : DIFFUSED EDGE

Located in Rome, Italy at the end of the Circus Maximus (a major public venue) this building was designed as a museum and a center for tourism. The objective wasfor the building to appear as accessible and welcoming to the public as the program suggests it should be. The concepts of public spaces and public attraction were very important to the design of this building. Throughout Rome and many major Italian cities the concept of public spaces is vastly important. In addition to these outdoor spaces, the buildings in Rome create a strong partition throughout the cities making the threshold between inside and outside to be a very blatant. This building takes in each of those ideas and develops them to create a more contemporary design that remains connected to the surrounding context.

 

Made up of shifting planes and transparent solids the form creates multiple public areas, both indoors and outdoors, throughout the building. These shifting planes and changes in the landscape create a variety of public spaces that are open to both people within the building as well as those walking along the street.  This allows for the concept of public space to be diffused in to and around the building making the design appear welcoming and accessible to both the tourists and residents of Rome.

 

In order to keep this building public yet still be representative of the surrounding context each of these planes will shift only slightly and more prominently keep a constant edge in reference to the dense edge that is so common in Italian cities.

 

Each of the planes, no matter how much they waver, ultimately comes back to the same, constant edge on the perimeter of the building. This allows for the reference to the prominent edge created by the buildings in Rome to be represented in this design. However even though the planes each reach the same edge, the glass solids which are pushed back from the perimeter of the planes, allow for the idea of permeability and openness to really become clear and prevent a harsh threshold between the indoors and outdoors. 

bottom of page