CASTRA METRO STATION

Completed in the College of Design Rome Program
Exhibited in Back from Italy: Building Within the Dimension of History at the Italian Cultural Institute, Embassy of Italy (Washington DC. 2019)
Exhibited in Rome, Or the Density of the Site (Rome, IT + Ames, IA. 2018)

2 weeks | with Jake Spangler + Kane Hassebrock | under Simone Capra, Consuelo Nunez Ciuffa, Laura Fassio

The Metro Station at the Castra of Hadrian resolves a common issue that occurs when archeological ruins are merged into the everyday infrastructures of the city. Precedents for this typology always resign the ruin to a purely casual connection with any context or users that circulate through the space. Our design intervention seeks to liberate the Castra from this potential future, making the casual intentional.

This intentionality is made by directly confronting the user with the ruin. A large cut into the landscape ramps downwards into the main atrium of the station and ends at the base of the support floor of the ruin. At this point, the viewer's line of sight is below the ruin, and a void cutting down into the lower spaces of the station is revealed. The transparency of the stratigraphy highlights the surreal reality of the ruin, removed completely from its context and reconstructed, like a diorama in a museum.

A platform floating above the ruin provides dedicated space for intentional observation, seperate from the flows of the main station. This perspective creates a direct link between the two main monuments of the site, the ruin and the wall.