WHEN DE GASPERI MET THE CIRCLES
Ideas competition for the urban regeneration of A. De Gasperi Square
Program Public square, natural zones, playground, 3 food kiosks, 1 restaurant, two-level underground parking
Team Valerio Franzone, 3C+T Capolei Cavalli A.A.
Client Municipality of Grottaferrata
Location Grottaferrata (Rome), Italy
Area public square13.000 m2; two-level underground parking 10.285 m2
Year 2010
When De Gasperi Met the Circles is an organic and coherent singularity matching architecture, nature, and humanity, space, environment, and human relations.
The functions located in the new square are now considered activities zones or, being more precise, relational attractors; they are meeting points, places capable to generate relational processes.
The project, by acting on the thin border between space and relational processes, turns the design into something wider than how it is usually considered, a programmatic and processual action. This means considering the physical space as something capable of stimulating, developing, and increasing the relational and social dynamics happening in it.
The architectural project starts as a spatial definition and as a hypothesis of a not-yet-articulated use to come. It continues, as a process, through the continuous and in becoming daily relations between architecture and humanity, between fixed physical structures and ever-changing human dynamics.
Piazza Alcide de Gasperi aims to be a place were to be free, it is a homage to the politicians and statesmen that took part in writing the Italian Constitution. It is a homage to the hard work they did to create the Repubblica Italiana and to make it grow thanks to what was a new concept of public matter.
