Design competition for the neighbourhood surrounding the City of Science / Progetto Flaminio - Quartiere della città della scienza

The city above the city.
IaN+, Atelier B’ Jordi Bellmunt i Agata Buscemi Arquitectes, SD Partners s.r.l.
In Rome a city in a city as always existed. A city where the self-regulation has established new districts and new awareness. In this city made of many cities is essential to think about urban as a project where architecture describe the private structure and the urban matrix the public one.
The project locate those two cities and let them discuss. The city , as a living and variable entity, modify itself on every action reorganizing the urban fabric and the flux interacting with the urban shape: avoiding it, invading it, passing through. Every city is composed by many cities.
The locations memory should be re-invented modifying such places. The future of the city is always a careful interpretation of the past. The idea of the city has to prevail on the city image. It’s necessary to make two coexisting cities the one above and the one below. The below cannot be erased, is the one made by preexistent traces and buildings created before our plan. It includes traces and preserve the location integrity, creating in the existent structure a space generator and in the same time a recognizable place in every single part.
The city above is the one growing in relation to the one below amplifying its characteristics, it’s a city growing without replacing pieces, it’s a city made of layers more than iconic buildings. A silent city exploiting the city below to live and develop. None has to prevail on the other, two dimensions coexist and compare with each other in a process of continuous interaction one part should never prevail on another. The city of the future will develop balancing the two parts.
The master plan foresee that on any warehouse new buildings volume are inserted accomplishing the functional plan. The new build propose again, through different forms, the comparison between the two cities in order to create a texture continuity and an abacus of architectural spaces defining the new city founded on the many spatial variability carried out through the relation between the buildings below and the one above.