Dall’isolato al giardino | SPAM 2019 DREAMCITY

The closed perimeter of the Mercato dei Fiori in Via Trionfale opens up to welcome new forms of urban life reset on the nature-city dialogue.
Start-ups, laboratories, classrooms available for citizens and innovative private initiatives overlook a large lowered garden of 3300 square meters: new functions that are anchored to the facades of the current market, preserved as a backdrop for an architectural box that reverses the usual internal-external relationship. It is in fact a garden-building, in which the logic of the inside and the outside gives way to the definition of a continuous experience where architecture intervenes to link nature and the city.
Having softened the grounds of the area on which the current Flower Market stands – through the design of oblique planes that connect the street level to the level of the jardin bas – the project works on the introduction of “habitable prostheses”, with the grafting of architectural parts capable of communicating with the pre-existence and activating unexpected aesthetic and functional balances. The interactive façade, the plate suspended over the garden and the large urban lantern of the library / media library are the elements that rewrite the dialogue between the architectural features of the old market and the graft of the contemporary.
Each graft is inserted in a specific point of the pre-existence to reactivate its meaning and to tell the urban value of the new cultural program. In this trajectory, the façade on via Paolo Sarpi is conceived as a metaphysical skeleton, a scenic machine that projects its shadows on the surrounding and at the same time capable of hosting ephemeral, temporary, interactive installations. An interface designed to inform passers-by and the city of the initiatives promoted by the new urban device, therefore continuously updated, never equal to itself.
The suspended plate acts as a long connective plank, raised above the garden and dimensionally calibrated to accommodate heterogeneous activities related to the community. It looks like an extensive urban atrium, from which to observe the reconstructed nature and reach the different functional nuclei of the building.
Last element, the suspended library / media library introduces a cultural element of excellence, where it is possible to collect and consult audiovisual texts and documents. This is a valuable function, strictly designed to reaffirm the vocation of the Prati-Trionfale district, home to important RAI offices. Suspended like a lantern or a boat on the choppy sea of ​​the market roof, it assumes the role of urban reference by projecting its image both towards the nearby dome of San Pietro and towards the Monte Mario reserve behind it.