Intellection

By Kira Collins. University of Oklahoma, College of Architecture, Division of Architecture. Fourth Year. Spring 2017. Rome, Italy.

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DA4

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The Wall Workshop

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DA5.1-2 Redux

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SA11

1-3 Column Comparison, written my Kevin Dobbs.

4-5 Temple Tastes, written by me.

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SA10 Villa Rotunda

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SA9.1-3 Sketching Carlo Scarpa. The first drawing is a redesign of the baseboards in the upper rooms of the Castelvecchio museum, the only Scarpa detail the entire trip which felt slightly hamfisted to me, with heavy concrete cast in a thick bunker between the soft plaster wall and wood plank walking surface. Scarpa must have wanted to make abundantly clear the difference between the contemporary walking surface and the ancient castle walls, but the angled concrete beach thrust in between plaster, pine, and travertine seemed like a little too much of a statement. I borrowed the language of Scarpa’s easels to cap the plank ends with pine, dovetail the travertine door sill, and float the boards on a pillow of air instead of butt them against concrete.

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More Scarpa.

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SA3

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SA8 Hadrian’s Villa. Spatial sequencing.

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SA7.3 Florence

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Methods Drawings. Torre Largo Argentina, Campidoglio, Ponti Della Musica e Settima, Auditorium Portico.

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DA3

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DA5.1 Left to right, top to bottom.

1. “E.T. Loves Manhattan” This scenario imagines that an outside force (aliens, hostile foreign powers, Artificial Intelligence gone rogue) decide that Manhattan is the ideal shape for world cities, and superimpose the new order over the existing context. Due to glitches or oversights in the new world order, a few pockets of context remain, including Porta Portese, Piazza Mastai, and the wall.

2. “Garden City” This scenario imagines a city with strategic pockets decayed away and filled in with emerald strings of trees and gardens. The ratio of “human ground” to “nature’s ground” becomes greater and nature forms an organic web of connections from garden to garden.

3. “Post Meteor” This scenario imagines that a fairly large meteor hits S. Francesco a Ripa, leaving a crater, ruins, and buildings in various stages of damage. The city builds a memorial to the church and builds back around the edges of the crater, leaving the field of fragments as an open park and contemplative space.

4. “Space-Time Warp” This scenario imagines that a time traveler decides to visit cities with roman heritage in the year 2017. However, the time traveler falls asleep at the controls and accidentally jumbles the settings on the time warp core. He winds up packing fragments of various cities into Trastevere. The result is presented as a collage highlighting the similarities and differences of these “sibling cities.”

5. “Haussmann goes to Rome” This scenario imagines that a well-meaning bureaucrat with large executive powers decides that Trastevere requires more tourism, and therefore requires longer vistas and more atmospheric streets. He pulls lines from the existing plan and straightens out city blocks to create a more geometrically ordered, and linear, flow of circulation through the neighborhood, centered around Porta Portese.

6. “Perambulation Permutation” Trastevere is very interesting as a Roman neighborhood, because it has a large diversity of building types, uses, and zones within a very few city blocks. This scenario seeks to imagine Trastevere reordering itself to include many different kinds of spatial sequences, with slight emendations to the figure ground growing to larger alterations.

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SA4 Museum re-use. Crypta Balbi and Baths of Diocletian. The corner sketch from Crypta Balbi shows deposits of layers over centuries, from the old roman steps to the renaissance palace. The tiny detail shows the skeletal terra-cotta pipes. The museum has to be described in both plan and section to picture the interlocking layers uncovered by the archaeologists. The Baths of Diocletian are a much more traditional arrangement, with some monumental remains and archaeological detritus arranged in large halls. Newer architecture conglomerates with old rooms.

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SA7.2 Continuous line sketches along urban context.

These sketches helped me learn that a Nolli plan doesn't describe everything, and a roof line doesn't always reflect street level. Small niches and corner conditions make a difference in experience, as do gardens spilling out into the street. The most interesting spaces have context close to the user, a view of the immediate surroundings, and a distance view of the rest of the city.

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Detail Sketches. MAXXI Museo.

Choosing interesting details for this building was a little challenging. Since it is conceptualized as an interweaving series of smooth planes, the building tries to hide its joints, or disguise them with a little paint or plaster. Reflections in glass make it difficult to know what exactly you are looking at. So, the details are small, subtle, at the scale of a hand or a couple fingers.

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Detail Sketches. MACRO Museo.

Odile Decq’s architecture is a spaceship from the dark side of the moon landed into the urban context. Her tectonics are dark steel forced into and entwining with the existing building. Her details are structural, bold, varied, and forceful. Her structure prefers to hang from above on thick members, only coming down on light spidery legs.