Unit 2 2014-15

This year, our design projects will focus on the environments of two parallel roads leading into Rome, the old Via Appia Antica and the newer Via Appia Nuova. The two different roads have unique and contrasting contexts, from ancient landscapes to intense urban life. Within these existing qualities, there are also conditions of spatial separation and social inequality, opening opportunities for a more unique and synergetic urban life.

The guiding theme of this year is Between Time. This refers to the diverse research area that spans over 2300 years of history, with a potential to mediate between old and new. Furthermore, we will explore architectural interventions that respond to more timeless qualities of space and civic engagement. We aim at designing architecture that is in every moment carefully present and alive.




Research area around the Via Appia Antica and Via Appia Nuova


Induction Exercise - Research

To prepare the year‘s work and to introduce Unit specific methodologies, we explored film stills by the Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky. Being part of a narrative, the images capture moments that reflect on elemental human conditions and consciousness in space. There is an inherent sensitivity to real and imagined places that has timeless qualities. We researched these qualities to develop distinct means of architectural representation.

To prepare the Unit work in Rome, we made the Rome Book. This allowed us to have information that a group of architects would require in such a place.




MArch Unit 2, Campidoglio by Michelangelo - Nostalgia by Tarkovsky, image by Divyani Patel

Rome is located in the centre of Italy on a hilly landscape around the winding river Tiber. It is one of the oldest settlements and capitals in Europe.

The Via Appia was built around 2300 years ago and connected southern parts of the Roman Empire with the city. The rural approach into Rome was carefully orchestrated with plantations of trees and built interventions, like aqueducts, towers and villas. Adjacent farmland and open spaces enlarged the perception of that cultural landscape. The Via Appia’s scenery changed abruptly close to the city and in its extension, vistas opened onto the Circus Massimo, Thermal Bath, Colosseum and other public institutions. Beyond was a dense city that had sophisticated infrastructure, urban planning systems and even multi-story apartment buildings. Rome reached over one million inhabitants in ancient times.

During the 18th century, the need for a wider road led to the construction of the Via Appia Nuova. In its section before Rome, it was placed in parallel to the old one, now known as Via Appia Antica. The uniqueness of the ancient landscape around the old road was already understood and the Via Appia Nuova was offset by a considerable distance.

The city has rapidly expanded in a diverse and fragmented manner along the Via Appia Nuova and other radial roads, during the 20th century. Urban block formations, industrial yards, social housing estates, suburban residential communities and transportation infrastructure emerged in an often unrelated and disconnected manner to the green corridor around the Via Appia Antica.

Our research area embraces the contrasting and heterogeneous conditions around the Via Appia Antica and Nuova. We can find agriculture and dense urban life, parks and car parks, derelict farm houses and large institutions, vistas onto the nearby mountains and enclosed streets, monuments and voids, old and new, rich and poor. Inbetween, there are pockets of neglect, wasteland, discontinuous path ways, seemingly endless walls of separation, undefined edge conditions, topographical level changes and social frictions.

It is a powerful but also fragile environment of unresolved interdependencies. The way the area works, development pressure, recent interest by the UNESCO and the construction of a new underground offer a whole range of questions.

Even though the research area has not entirely found itself, it is also in the incompleteness that we can see some of its beauty. It is a source of inspiration that is reflected in ourselves. We can relate to it with an awareness and respect for life. As such, we do not just solve problems but allow our work to resonate in the world we live in.

The topic Between Time addresses a tolerance towards the past and future that opens questions about the making and purpose of architecture within this particular environment. The diverse and old history of the research area offers the potential to mediate between extreme time-scales. Beside this aspect, this year’s topic also refers to possible interventions that embrace more timeless and elemental qualities of architecture and civic engagement. We aim at developing strategic interventions that allow a presence and life deep within an alternative future.

The Unit trip to Rome will be in mid November. We will explore the research area and our investigations will address historic layers and existing conditions, such as physical form, local communities, urban life, vegetation, atmosphere and finer qualities of place. Furthermore, each student will explore potential needs and opportunities, to open room for imagination.

During the Unit trip, each student will carefully choose a location, scale and function for their main building design within the research area. Speculations about future scenarios and careful design strategies will guide site selection and a focused analysis.

In our work, we will explore ways in which design programmes and architecture can be an invigorating and synergetic part of urban life. We aim at understanding each intervention to be an anchoring piece within our social, spatial and environmental contexts.

Cities are shared environments and we will ask how contexts, life and architecture can resonate deep into one another. We aim at buildings to be placed and used in a meaningful way. As such, our interventions will address a range of interrelated scales, from urban through to building and detail scales.

The individual projects will focus on designing site specific buildings. Each student will carefully develop architectural qualities, sense of place, logic of space, proportion, resourcefulness and programmatic precision as well as technical and material finesse. By invigorating existing and imagining new, we intend to create schemes that are both, sustainable and enjoyable.

MArch Unit 2 visited the office Labics on our trip to Rome, in November 2014. They are an architectural and urban planning practice that has worked in a range of scales. As part of the Biennale in Venice in 2008, Labics exhibited their research Borderline Metropolis about Rome.

Maria Claudia Clemente and Francesco Isidori introduced us to their projects and their diverse way of working with specific contexts, research, concepts and theories.




Francesco Isidori and students at Labics in Rome, November 2014 (photo by Uwe Schmidt-Hess)

La Grande Bellezza

"... The cardinal fascinates Jep, and is possessed of an intimate knowledge of Rome's occult secrets, sacred and profane. His character weirdly reminded me of an episode in the life of Pope John Paul II, who as a young Polish priest was encouraged by Krakow's Cardinal Adam Sapieha to study in Rome, specifically to develop his sense of Romanità, the almost untranslatable sense of "Roman-ness". It is not precisely theology, or history or politics, but something encoded in the squares and gardens of Rome that is vital for a potential Pope, or for anyone who wishes to understand the vanity and seductive glory of human wishes."

Movie Review by Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, 05 September 2014