Roma 20-25: New Life Cycles for the Metropolis is a look into the future city of Rome as imagined by architectural students from 25 Italian and foreign universities. Sponsored by the Department for Urban Transformation of the Municipality of Rome and MAXXI, the exhibition brings together ideas for shaping the city’s connection to its regional environs.
Landscape Architecture Chair Richard Weller, with student Angelina R. Jones (MLA'16 candidate), alumnae Kate Rodgers (MLA'15) and Selina Chiu (MLA'15), and faculty members Lindsay Falk and Valerio Morabito, proposed an infrastructural system to transport waste from the city of Rome to the periphery, where it would be “digested” through natural processes. The closed-loop system utilizes the forre that intersect the site in the form of erosion lines. The project presents a “a new whole-of-city metabolic network which collects organic waste in Rome’s public spaces and then redistributes that waste to where the heads of the forre begin.” Under their proposal, the artful fountains of Rome would function not only to bring in, but also bring back.
Acting almost as a sequel to the legendary 1978 Roma Interrotta, a landmark exhibition on urban design, Roma 20-25 is “no longer just about the city, but the city in its regional context,” says Weller. While the original “Intervention” concentrated its efforts on how to blend the heritage environment with contemporary building, “mark[ing] the era of transition from architecture as destruction to architecture as sensitive development,” Roma 20-25 is more expansive in its scope, looking further from the historical city to the regions that surround and sustain it.
Roma 20-25 is currently on view at the MAXXI until January 17, 2016.
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