Rome Design Studio Project 2 – Intermezzo

It's a studio day today. Normally I'd sooner be outside or, at the vary least, near a window, but it's cloudy and there is something in the air that seems to be driving the population of Rome crazy. Everyone has somewhere to go and to hell with anyone that happens, yours truly, to be in the way. No matter, I need to be in studio. I'm starting to feel the walls of this project close in on me. I only have 2 weeks left and I haven't produced anything new to speak of in the last 2 weeks. My mind has been occupied with other thing: I just wrote my one and only exam, applied for jobs for the next 4 months and started to do some Christmas shopping.

That said, during my time studying for my exam I did formulate a number of opinions which will act as guide posts for development of my project over the next 2 weeks.

Technology is hidden: it is not the bold thing of steam, speed and power it was imagined it would become in the early 20th century. Likewise, the economy of the world is increasingly idea driven, ideas which are carried by underground cables between homes and businesses and data centers located hundreds of miles outside our cities.

The hidden nature of our technology frees the ground plain and speaking to the piazzas of Rome, creating places for gathering and loitering.

There is an explicit limitation to our modern technology. The internet is a dynamic entry but that dynamism can only find express through the outlet of a computer or some other form of screen or such device. A building, my building, which aims to embody the internet should also have this limitation placed upon its expression: finding itself stark and expressionless along the breadth of its form but exploding into complex and dynamic forms at its ends. In this way the building can be seen to mirror the cables of internet and the screens on which the data they carry is deployed.

This methodology of design has the added bonus of mirroring, perhaps even mocking, the static and immobile historical buildings of Rome. Their forms remain static and unchanging, while this new building, a tribute to the digital revolution, plays both games, unmovable in part, yet, as though to scoff at the viewer, just as one's eye begins to move away from its form the ends of the building explode into a tumultuous dance, deconstructing itself and exposing its core.

This manor of deconstruct speaks to the urban makeup of Rome: the combination of new and old, where everything new is on a steady path to ruin. In this process history is exposed, its lessons from past becoming exposed.