Rome and it's modern architecture!

The Parisch Church of Dio Padre Misericordioso built as part of the Vicarage project “50 Churches for Rome 2000” was designed as a mark and symbol of the Grand Jubilee of 2000 it takes on the idea of a ship, a ship which ploughs the seas of the Third millennium. The Jubilee Church has been conceived as a new center for a somewhat isolated housing quarter in the Tor Tre Teste area, located outside central Rome. The three shells discretely imply the Holy Trinity, the reflecting pool symbolizes water in the ritual of Baptism. 

The MAXXI National Museum of the XXI Century Arts is a new institution of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities of Italy. In 1998 the ministry advertised the international call for tenders and among the 273 candidacies the winning project of Zaha Hadid convinced the jury because of its possibilities to integrate with the urban texture and the innovative and highly creative architectonical solution. The complexity of shapes, their sinuous outline, the variation and interlacing of  dimensions, determine a spatial and functional plot of great complexity. 

Built for the 1960 Olympics, the palazzetto is a modest sports stadium in an innovative concrete dome. Designed by Pier Luigi Nervi it hosted boxing among other sports during the Olympic Games. The innovative dome is made of ribbed reinforced concrete. The lower half of the dome has continuous ribbon of window the whole way around the circular stadium, beneath the ribbed, white-painted concrete ceiling. Stunning!

The Parco della Musica is a large public music complex on the north side of Rome, exploiting a spacious site that was part of the 1960 Olympic area. It is composed of three separate giant bug-like halls positioned around an open air amphitheatre, the halls look like three enormous ‘music boxes’, whose colours and materials recall those of the domes dotting the urban landscape of Rome. Each concert hall differs from the other in terms of dimension and functions, but they are all characterized by an extreme flexibility and versatility of the space. By these means, space can be regulated and adjusted to the nature of performance, where floor and ceiling can be moved to adjust the acoustic properties of the wall. 

The Ara Pacis Museum, located along the Tiber River, near the Ponte Cavour, is an integral part of the urban context of the Augustean Area. It is designed to house the ancient relic, the Ara Pacis Augustae, a sacrificial altar dating to 9 B.C., originally housed in a building designed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo in 1938. The only surviving part of the Morpurgo structure is a low travertine wall that Mussolini had engraved with the "Res Gestae" (the Acts of the Divine Augustus). The new design protects and enhances the relic. The travertine comes from the same quarry as the stone that was used to build the Piazza of the Emperor Augustus in the Thirties; it was also, more recently, used by Richard Meier for the Getty Centre in Los Angeles and other important architectural works. 

How to reconcile a vision of the divine, something that has generally been represented using the symbolic forms of the circle, sphere and central plan, with the requirements of a modern culture that tends to avoid the ideals of wholeness, perfection and hierarchy? Sartogo Architetti intelligently resolved this problem in Rome. The first step entailed designing a semi-circular church hall and adding to this solid the void of an exterior apse, also semi-circular in form, so that the two forms complete one another. The second step consisted of placing a large round window, reminiscent of medieval rose windows, in the perimeter wall. This is coupled with the emerging form of a semi-dome, containing a parish centre, suggesting the possible transformation of the virtual circumference of the plan into a sphere. The path that separates the church from the parish centre is a highly symbolic space and converges towards a focal point that is dominated by a narrow and elongated cross.

Ciao!

// Niklas