A Design for Piazza Sant'Ignazio - Rome

R.O.M.E

Piazza S.Ignazio Politecnico di Milano Architecture of Interiors Design Studio

Professors: Matilde Cassani, Lorenzo Belli, Paola Sturla Students: Mohamed Aboulfarah, Amirhossein Adelfar, Romane Cazenave, Amirreza Paknezhad

A. Recognation of the Piazza 1- Charactristic Buildings 2- Materials and Textures 3- Urban Furnitures 4- Color Swatches 5- Analysis

B. Pre-Design on the Piazza 1 The Aim

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2- The Philosophy 3- The Design 4- The Inspirations

C. Design on the Piazza 1 Mood - Boards

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2- Geometry Study on the Piazza 3- The Machine 4- Materiality 5- A Survey on the Design

A. Recognation of the Piazza 1- Characteristic Buildings

The Church Symmetric Buidlings Carabinieri

A. Recognation of the Piazza 2- Materials and Textures

A. Recognation of the Piazza 3- Urban Furnitures

A. Recognation of the Piazza 4- Color Swatches

A. Recognation of the Piazza 5- Analysis

B. Pre-Design on the Piazza 1- The Aim 2- The Philosophy

THE AIM OF DESIGN IS TO ATTRACT THE PEOPLE With considering the position of the Piazza, it is clear that there is enough giant historical architecture near around the piazza to attract the people and tourists in different ages.Moreover, the Rome itself as one of the most important cities around the world has enough interesting and powerful spaces to attract people. Talking about the piazza, we can find the best and the most successful samples of the piazza in Rome. As we talk about the Rome and the piazza it is obvious that designing in this context is not a simple job.

As we started to think about what could we do for the piazza we always reach the same point that whatever we do it is already something more attractive very close to the plaza.If the people want to stay in a piazza they would just walk 2 minutes more and go to the Pantheon or Piazza the Pietra.

We were there and we felt the situation.Piazza S. Ignazio is a dead place and not many people would like to spend some minutes there because there is no quality and no attraction there.This situation leads us to go further on the meaning of Attraction. Thus, our main aim to redesign the piazza is to create a new meaning of attraction by means of architecture.

So the main idea is to do something that will stay in minds. all the other objectives like sustainability, people comfort, providing proper areas for seating and .. are results which come out from the main idea to attract people.

A clear definition of attraction and finding the basic reasons and philosophies about why people are attracted to a place are needed to have a better understanding on the topic.

A SURVEY ON PHILOSOPHY OF ATTRACTION

“Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.” -Albert Einstein/Bashar In the New Thought philosophy, the law of attraction is the belief that by focusing on positive or negative thoughts people can bring positive or negative experiences into their life The law of attraction has no scientific basis and has been dubbed a pseudoscience.

In his 1902 lecture entitled “Waves in Water, Air and Ether” given at the Royal Institution, J. A. Fleming said: “All branches of physical science demonstrate the fact that every completed manifestation, of whatever kind and on whatever scale, is started by the establishment of a nucleus, infinitely small but endowed with an unquenchable energy of attraction.”

Most of us were taught to be sloppy thinkers. We remain frozen in worry or defeated by fear. We believe that we have become victims of our circumstances. As our thoughts remain negative or mostly unconscious, we end up attracting by default. We are stunned when we develop a horrible disease, become involved in a tragic car accident or suffer from financial failure. Without realizing it, the thoughts we have been thinking are all responsible for this.

The ability to focus a thought becomes the driving force behind The Law of Attraction. Focusing on a single thought purely and clearly for a short duration of time becomes the starting point. Once you become adept at focusing your thoughts it will be easier and more efficient.

B. Pre-Design on the Piazza

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3 The Initial Design

Deceiving ls Attractive IN RESEARCHING AND PRESENTING optical illusions to wide audiences, Ihave found that their effect on people is very primal. It does not matter how old they are, how artistic they are, how intelligent they are. what their background or culture is; people just love optical illusions and enjoy being deceived in a delightful and surprising way. The traditional form and presentation of optical illusions, however, has not generally been artistic, but scientific, designed to demonstrate various aspects of how our visual,perceptual system can be misled.

Of course, one can find examples of optical illusions in art since Roman times. but these were mainly dismissed as mistakes of perspective, errors that crept into works by careless artists. In a famous eighteenth-century engraving by William Hogarth, he challenged the viewer to find all the perspective mistakes. ÂŤ Masters of Deception_ Al SeckelÂť

You can’t get out of this Deception is the act of propagating a belief that is not true, or is not the whole truth (as in half-truths or omission). Deception can involve dissimulation, propaganda, and sleight of hand, as well as distraction, camouflage, or concealment. There is also self-deception, as in bad faith. It can also be called, with varying subjective implications, beguilement, deceit, bluff, mystification, ruse, or subterfuge.

Deception is a recurring theme in modern philosophy. In 1641 Descartes published his meditations, in which he introduced the notion of the Deus deceptor, a posited being capable of deceiving the thinking ego about reality. The notion was used as part of his hyperbolic doubt, wherein one decides to doubt everything there is to doubt. The Deus deceptor is a mainstay of so-called skeptical arguments, which purport to put into question our knowledge of reality. The punch of the argument is that all we know might be wrong, since we might be deceived. Stanley Cavell has argued that all skepticism has its root in this fear of deception.

B. Pre-Design on the Piazza

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4 The Inspirations

Ring Installation Vendôme, Paris Designer: Arnaud Lapierre The Ring installation by Arnaud Lapierre in Place Vendôme in Paris, France plays with the context of this urban space through reflections, light and the interaction of passers-by. The piece was created for the FIAC 2011 Conference and sponsored by Audi. It is an aggregation of offset mirrored blocks stacked to form a cylinder.

The simple repetition of the mirrored blocks creates an interior and exterior space where the urban context of Place Vendôme is filtered selectively through the defined volume of the installation. It essentially deconstructs and morphs the surrounding buildings and sky and produces a disorienting, but engaging experience of the plaza.

The buildings appear and reappear between the mirrored surfaces and voids, changing the perception of space and enclosure for each user.

It alters the condition of the plaza by creating spaces that are at times transparent and at other moments reflections of the visitors, the sky and the buildings beyond.

“Ring” invits the visitor to play with the installation and space on two levels: The very first approach would be more related to experience a change in the urban areas: as a temporal kinetics. The facets of each cube reflect the place and reconstruct a paradigm that breaks the reading of the course. Ring works at this stage as a visual intrusion, an acceleration that changes the perception of the visited place. This is a spacial rediscovery.

In a second step, the installation proposes to get inside, to see his own image multiplied to infinity, which collides with urban detail, it is now a place outside time and outside spatiality ,in total rupture with the outside principle . The vision is more intimate.

Invisible Barn California, USA Designer: STPMJ 2015 Text description provided by the architects.

Invisible Barn is a site-specific design proposal that re-contextualizes the landscape of the site by projecting the landscape on the structural proposition. A barn shapedwooden structure is sheeted with reflective film on its surfaces. This mirror-finished folly is placed in the middle of the grove and reflects its surrounding environment: different species of trees and plants, sky, ground and the seasonal changes of the site.

The reflection of the folly within its enclosed grove allows the structure to smoothly assimilate into the nature. The incisions that penetrate through the folly allow visitors to maneuver in, out, and around the structure.

Invisible Barn is a folly that loses its manmade architectural presence in nature but adds novel experience and interaction to the users.Invisible Barn is placed in the core of the grove which lies on the passageway of the site. Around the circumference of the grove there are a dozen of trees in similar size and equal spacing from one another. Due to the similarity of its size and placement of the trees, the projection on the mirrored surface is similar to what people would see without the folly. The visual illusion that blurs the perceptual boundary between the folly and the site, allows the folly to be disappeared and invisible in nature, reconstructing the landscape of the site

C. Design on the Piazza 1- Mood - Boards

MARGINALIA.

BY EDGAR A. POE.

"For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.

There is, however, a class of fancies of exquisite delicacy which are not thoughts, and to which as yet I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt to language. These fancies arise in the soul, alas how rarely.

Only at epochs of most intense tranquillity, when the bodily and mental health are in perfection. And at those weird points of time, where the confines of the waking world blend with the world of dreams. And so I captured this fancy, where all that we see, or seem, is but a dream within a dream."

AZZA DI SANT’IGNAZIO : MOOD BOARD

C. Design on the Piazza 2- Geometry Study on the Piazza

C. Design on the Piazza 3- The Machine

The morphology of the piazza is characterized by a perfect symetry based on the dashed axe below.

The machine in implamented on this axe in order to deconstruct symetry and to create a distorsion in human sight thanks to mirrors.

C. Design on the Piazza 4- Materiality

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C. Design on the Piazza 5- Structure of the Machine

C. Design on the Piazza 5- A Survey on the Design

Piazza di Sant Ignazio is located in the old centre of Rome in-between many famous touristic places of the city.

By visiting the site, we came up to the point that the piazza is more used as a transitive space than a real place to see, because of its proximity to the main landmarks of Rome (Pantheon, Fontana di Trevi, Piazza di Spagna,…)

The approach was firstly to bring people in this piazza, but mostly to make them stay and enjoy it as a fully fledged landmarks of Rome.

To fulfil this aim, we thought that the most powerful way to do it was to act on the perception that people have by experimenting this piazza.

We noticed that this theme of the perception is already exploited inside the church with the “trompe l’oeil” dome. Then we chose to focus on the concept of deceiving, to make people experiment the space by feeling it more than understanding it.

Starting from this concept of deception, and the peculiarity of the dome, we based our planning strategy on the geometric principles of the piazza, that all starts from the dome.

Following this process, we reach a composition of circular shapes that aims to link everything by using the floor.

The main point of the project turned out to focus on the involvement of the people regarding the functioning of the piazza. By making people interact with the space, the sensitive impact becomes much more powerful than the intellectual one. Besides, it turns out that the piazza di Sant’Ignazio is considered as a masterpiece of baroque architecture. It was conceived as a theatre stage, which fits perfectly to the idea of touching people in their senses. This way, people become actor, characters rather than passive public.

The solution we finally reached was to provide an urban machine people can interact with.

The circular shape incurs a dynamic, a rotary movement that we decided to couple with a system of turning mirrors.

As a result, the space remains quite similar with its colours, dimensions, symmetry,... but the perception of the space is totally wreaked havoc. The machine acts as a generator of new facades, feelings and emotions, following the will of the characters of the play. The user is finally allowed to lose himself in the piazza, as a break within his touristic, well-organized pathway.