LET THEM BE NOMADIC!
University of Pennsylvania Studio Project
Fall Semester /2005
Studio Instructor: Winka Dubbledam
Site: Rome, Italy
This Dynamic Systems Studio focused on inducing instability, unpredictability, and atomization operating within digital environments. The work capitalized on the aleatory and the robust potential of dynamical systems, where each student played a fully participatory role in determining the urban, spatial, formal, and material consequence of their design research. The studio challenged the contemporary knowledge of how ancient mid-European cities, in this case, Rome, might operate when confronted with the massive and dramatic change to its urban fabric. Current plans to bring a high-speed rail service and its attendant architectural consequences into the city’s centre historical generated a powerfully disruptive proposition to which we had to respond in a wide array of sophisticated urban, architectural and landscape driven designs.
The goal of this project was to research and to rethink mobility in both social and architectural context. The project will provide the city of Rome with a unique infrastructure where people from other cities can easily move in and start to interact with the emergence of social and cultural improvement of the city. The project reexamined traditional notions of social and architectural mobility through intense research and dynamic analysis focusing on the network of EU’s mobility centers. A nomadic infrastructure was proposed for the city of Rome in order to facilitate dynamic social interactions and to provoke cultural investment.