SEARCH AND DESTROY

You must have heard that being a contemporary architect in Rome is sort of a mission impossible.

But honestly, who has never thought of challenging this commonplace as a way to truly feel as an architect? That is, without having to care about critics and insults from the token intellectuals.

If you are one of those, here is what you are after! A non-academic contest where no opinion from the Fine Arts is required and where everything is possible, including tearing down the Coloseum and building the new AS Roma football stadium in its place.

From the Altar of the Fatherland to the Aurelian Walls, from the Termini Rail Station to the Palazzaccio, from the Temple of Minerva Medica to the Città Universitaria, from the Palazzo dei Congressi to the building of the Italian postal company, from the Foro Mussolini all the way to the new “monuments of contemporary Italian architecture” – either the Maxxi, the new Tiburtina station, the Ara Pacis or The Cloud of Fuksas…we don’t necessarily have to like any historical or important building or think of it as beautiful. As in Alessandro Baricco’s Lesson 21, sometimes we want to think that that the Ninth Simphony of Beethoven is overrated without being considered heretics. And we want to put ourselves to the test and make it more beautiful.

Taking part in the contest is easy; there are only a few rules to be followed: identify a building in the City of Rome which is considered particularly important by the public opinion, destroy it and replace it with a brand new one, as long as it keeps the same value and serves the same purpose. And, as Petrolini made Nero say: “Rome will be born again, more beautiful and magnificent than ever before.”

An iconoclast project, a half-serious game, perhaps a provocation but also a way to think over both the role that contemporary architecture plays in an historical city and the concepts of collective memory, monument and identity. As Rem Koolhaas wrote in Junkspace: “Identity is like a mousetrap in which more and more mice have to share the original bait, and which, on closer inspection, may have been empty for centuries.”

http://reviewcompetitions.com/index.php/en/