Rome Lecture Series
Marco Casamonti on March 10, 2016
The gathering of students and faculty for architecture lectures has always been a compelling sort of occasion for me. As I glance across the room at the sea of black attire and semi-serious expressions, I feel this immense sense of being in architecture school–more so than during the late nights of studio or the intense review sessions.
So during one of the first lectures here in Rome, I felt a slight nostalgia for Ithaca as the crowd quietly situated themselves in the presentation room. The lecture was given by Marco Casamonti on Sustainable Landmarks. He is a founding architect of Archea Associati, a firm based in Florence with offices in Milan, Rome, Beijing, Dubai and São Paolo.
The lecture began with a historical overview of contemporary Rome since the 1920’s Fascist period. Casamonti discussed the 5 points of Corbusier’s architecture in relation to the design proposals for buildings that strived towards becoming “new icons of Italy”. For example, Torre Velasca, a skyscraper built in the 1950s by BBPR in Milan, went through multiple iterations of Miesian and Corbusien languages before metamorphosing into a modern-day Medieval fortress. Though towering in height compared to the surrounding context, the massive bulk of it seemed embedded within the ground. I didn’t find the Torre particularly charming, though I’m not sure how the Italians feel about it.
The second part of the lecture consisted of an overview of the various projects Archea Associati has realized in the past twenty something years. I was drawn to Casamonti’s description of the process behind designing the Antinori Winery in Tuscany. He talked about the design as “building a piece of landscape” and how the winery was a place for shared experiences. This was a place that our studio visited in February. The memory of laying in the grass at this winery (after 2 glasses of delicious wine) as the sun was setting on the Tuscan landscape was still fresh in my mind… it was indeed a incredible shared experience.