Neues Wissenschaftliches Museum in Rom / Museo della Scienza di Roma (IT)

Lead: Schiattarella Associati

Model: Modelab

The urban fabric of the Flaminio has always been characterized by the coexistence of two territorial systems. On one side, there is a well-established building structure with blocks that align along Via Flaminia and extend towards the Tiber. On the other side, there is a vast area dedicated to sports, in continuity with the Foro Italico, which faces the opposite bank of the Tiber.

The Flaminio Stadium, the Parco della Musica, and the Corso Francia Viaduct are "anomalous" elements, while the Olympic Village, despite its typological diversity, tends to expand and reinforce the essentially residential continuity.

Within the residential system along Via Flaminia, the urban continuum, consisting of tower or courtyard buildings, is interrupted at Via Guido Reni by two areas designated for military depots. These presences have erased the urban dimension for many years. In the place of the first barracks, Zaha Hadid's project has been realized, whose fluid architecture dynamically transforms the urban logic of the context. On the other hand, Paola Viganò's project, on the contrary, intervenes by reconstructing connections with the existing building fabric.

In the area subject to the competition, the call, which aims to preserve the architectural memory of the place by largely preserving the barracks' structures, requires a different approach.

We believe it is necessary to intervene not with a unified volume, which would create a disproportionately large and impactful building in the urban context, but by working on the construction of a system composed of sub-sets.

This segmentation allows for the creation of a fabric and architecture that is more proportionate to the human scale of the building sector.

Today the military depot looks like an empty box enclosed by a wall (acting as an insurmountable barrier) which excludes the city. The internal space, on the contrary, is presented as a concatenation of "voids" of great charm. Revealing and enhancing the void: this is the key to our proposal which takes shape through an operation of subtraction, first, and of addition, then.

• EXCAVATE, subtracting to allow the urban public space to invade the pre-existing buildings

• CREATE internal cavities that define squares, public roads and natural and light environments set in the mass of the sheds. The museum opens to the city. The public spaces overlook the exhibition spaces without interruption,

• SEEK continuity with the flows envisaged by the Viganò project

• INSERT the new volumes within the complex. Very simple parallelepipeds that recall the stereometry of the existing buildings around them to reaffirm the need to mend the "urban tear" and to build landscapes in analogy

• DEMATERIALIZE the new volumes. The translucent skin of the surfaces that light up from within and the encapsulation in a metal cage make the contours of the new masses less peremptory and more allusive

The compact configuration of the volumes is enriched with cuts, sudden voids, soaring volumes, and new materialities that transform the rigid and uninviting mass of the barracks into a space rich in vitality. The urban landscape undergoes a complete transformation. The pre-existing structure ends up becoming the foundation for a rich and complex landscape in which the immateriality of emptiness and the dematerialization of the volumes mitigate the contrast with the pre-existing elements.

In our proposal, the Museum of Science is not conceived as a self-contained and delimited building, but primarily as a structure that opens up to the city. We have imagined a porous and permeable urban fragment in which urban life and the life of the museum coexist and overlap without interfering with each other. They are two independent layers that intertwine and find, along their paths, points of visual contact, moments of communicative dialogue, sudden openings of vistas that encourage mutual introspection.

On one hand, the "voids" of the public spaces extend deep into the body of the barracks, creating a network of internal roads that, at the ground floor, in a sequence of enclosed/open spaces, insert themselves among the museum spaces, connecting them to the surrounding road system. On the other hand, there are spaces that allow our proposal to be linked to the Viganò project.

The focal point of the entire system is the elevated public square, at the level of the roofs of the military depots and accessible via a staircase, which also represents the ideal endpoint of the Boulevard envisioned in the Viganò project. It is the community's place where glassy transparencies and openings in the floor will allow citizens to preview parts of the exhibition while, at the same time, reversing perspectives, enabling them to be observed by visitors in the exhibition halls. The perceptual barriers between the interior and exterior are visually blurred, creating the visual continuity that is one of the key elements of our proposal.

At sunset, the entire square becomes a "place of the night." The milky illumination, which can also take on shades of color, will transform it into one of the city's gathering spots, a square where people can linger in the summer to enjoy the effects of the Ponentino wind that travels up the Tiber and settles on the elevated terrace.