PARCO DEGLI AQUADOTTI
public park on Rome's urban edge

date: 1996

This project is partly an investigation across a wide range of scale; a key design principle was the consideration of human scale elements to make comprehensible the vastness of the site. In this proposal for a park on the intersection of the ancient city wall and several major aquaducts, a present wasteland is reclaimed by the deliberate extension of urban elements (houses, small gardens) to mark the boundary between city and landscape, and maintain the integrety of the untouched ruins. Human scale elements (tiles, handrails, etc.) were used as direct parallels to the large urban interventions of which they formed a part.

The overall strategy for the area was to mark the natural historic boundary between the city and the surrounding landscape by the creation of two distinct but connected parks, one urban and compact, and one vast with a view to the distant hills and source of the aquaducts. All programmed public activity is thus contained in the urban park, in a strip between the two aquaducts and tightly integrated with the adjacent neighbourhoods. It contains the following elements:

Archeological museum:
The building mimics the form of the aquaduct no longer standing, and forms the entrance to the urban park. Artefacts are displayed on or within the inner surface and viewed from ramps within the park.

Housing type 1: cut courtyard blocks
A mutation of the fragmented rectilinear blocks immediately adjacent and the courtyard buildings further to the northeast.

Housing type 2: linear garden units
These low-rise flats terminate in lines of cypress trees, which reinforce the absent line of the aquaduct.

Public performance area:
The theatre is an impression in the landscape blocking all views but stage and sky; a belvedere marks the edge of urban Rome and surveys the landscape.

Housing type 3: marker towers
These form the outer edge of urban Rome. Following the line of the ancient wall, they look outward on the uninhabited landscape.