Andrea Bastoni

Thesis in Architectural Design

Thesis in Architectural Design
Thesis by Andrea Bastoni
Contact Email: andrea.bastoni@hotmail.it

University of Rome "La Sapienza" - Faculty of Architecture "Valle Giulia"
Academic Year 2011 - 2012
Prof.Arch. Franco Purini
Correlator: Lina Malfona

A new urban center for Rome in Centocelle

A NEW URBAN CENTRALITY:
transformation and redevelopment of the Centro Carni complex in Rome

Territorial framework.
The urban area of reference, located between high-density neighborhoods such as Tor Sapienza, Colli Anieni, Quarticciolo, Centocelle, has a strong vocation to play the role of Urban Centrality and to accommodate the establishment of excellent services and to induce redevelopment processes on a local scale in the neighboring neighborhoods characterized by profound differences in terms of the time of construction, urban morphology and social characteristics. The settlement system of this urban sector is diversified and fragmented. The reasons for this configuration are to be attributed to a development of the urban fabric that, over time, has consolidated in parts, according to autonomous logics, leaving a large void between the more compact fabric of the consolidated city and the more rarefied peripheral one. The design idea arises from the intent to unite the new centrality to the pre-existing ones, extending their routes, and coming to determine a solid and compact design that adds urban quality to the area. This unity and compactness is, however, stopped by the opening of a visual cone (completely green) and a third axis that interrupt the connection with the pre-existing structures, determining two different urban moments, characterized by the tower (symbol of recognizability and identity of the neighborhood) and the university residence. The proposal is aimed at redefining a local identity and improving the quality of life in the neighborhoods, generating places that constitute the connective tissue of collective life, through the creation of squares, greenery, residences, roads and services useful to society.

The university residence.
The design theme focuses on the dialectical and contradictory relationship between the poetics of unity and the poetics of the fragment. The volume of the building, in its courtyard layout, appears as a unitary and highly compact block. This apparent solidity is subverted by fragments that, grafted into the layout, with sudden breaks, corrode its integrity, transforming the courtyard from a closed and introverted place and space to an open and permeable space. These fragments, however, respect the edge or enclosure of the courtyard, without completely distorting it, being only destructuring elements that do not act as protagonists of the composition, but are limited to introducing a certain calculated imbalance. Therefore, the compositional choice is to keep alive the courtyard housing type, which is based on the elementary gesture of appropriation of space through the tracing of a protective enclosure.
Furthermore, the fragments give rise to a self-stratification that gives the architectural composition a narrative character and a high architectural complexity of the spaces. Through this process the internal squares give the idea of having their current conformation as a result of different temporal stratifications.