With the Italian Space Agency (ASI) building in Rome, architects Alfonso Femia and Gianluca Peluffo of 5+1AA have definitely set aside what up to now had seemed their signature feature - understatement. These young architects from Genoa are attracting increasing attention with every successive brief. They have now designed a building to meet the many functional requirements of a little known public institution that nonetheless is geared to impact heavily on our future. The new architecture, which will certainly contribute to the new face of Rome in the 21st century, had to resolve diverse problems. Completed in July of this year, the building rises in an outlying district of Rome near Tor Vergata University destined for major expansion in the next few years. Do you remember the black monolith in Stanley Kubrik’s movie A Space Odyssey? While not the imposing theocratic mystery object of Kubrik fame, the ASI building is a stately, albeit horizontal, curving form, a mythical shape that speaks to our subconscious. The central building designed by Femia and Peluffo describes a gentle unhurried arc. Its elastic shape imparts no sense of urgency. The surrounding volumes and geometries seem to have been ejected by this central monolith, an extension of its spatial organisation. Yet the convex and concave areas formed by the building’s curving shape seem to be keeping the surrounding units within their magnetic field. These two features of ejection and attraction sum up the duality of the building itself in its inner and outer aspects. Internally, its function is to engage with occupants and visitors. Externally, the building presents differing degrees of openness depending on the angle of approach. It is an openness that seems to extend well beyond our earthly realm and take in the cosmos. An outer façade echoing Bernini’s famous colonnade provides a fitting welcome to newcomers from wherever on the planet and even beyond. Although only appreciated from a distance, the...
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