Studio Professor: Peter Eisenman
Fall 2007
For a theoretical investigation into the socio-political implications of city planning, this design looked at site of EUR, an extension of Rome originally intended to be a tribute to the Italian Fascist Party for the World's Exhibition of 1942. By deploying an idea of an organic, infrastructural landscape throughout the site, it transforms the hierarchical and dialectical planning of EUR. The buildings, which were previously anchors in an axial relationship with each other, become singularities emanating from the fabric of the infrastructure. With studio partner Stephen Nielson.
Examining one building site within EUR, the Teatro (theatre), and its original plans by Luigi Moretti, offered an opportunity to test the implications of a building singularity within the concept of an infrastructural landscape. Using the archived drawings of Moretti procured on the site visit to Italy, infrastructural transformations were applied to generate a new building on the site.
By reinterpreting these found systems as elements within a network of infrastructure and topography, a structural framework, or mesh, begins to offer shifting and temporal programmatic and organizational opportunities. As the system interferes with a monument, in this case Moretti’s Teatro, the underlying grid of the section and plan become realized as an infrastructure of trusses. The programmatic needs begin to occupy that system, altering the trusses and creating voids within the infrastructure where program can occur.
QUANG TRUONG