Palimpsest

Rome faces a dilemma - a dilemma where tourist economy and local residency stands at scathing confrontation. Museums and their design also face a dilemma - a dilemma where architecture must contort between the specific and the generic at the artifact level while clumsily occupying a questionable zone between private and public space at the urban level. A traditional archaeological museum for the “Eternal City” is now incongruous in a contemporary context fraught with such opposing forces. Rather than steering these opposites away in avoidance, this project guides them towards a purposeful collision. This new “anti-museum” captures these contradictions and enlarges them to the degree that such confrontations exist in discordant harmony, where no element is alienated. If the city is an urban palimpsest - its form continually altered while bearing traces of earlier incarnations - it is in celebrating this complex and layered process of metamorphosis that the project draws its design ethos.