Project № 05 · Urban

How a school
rethinks the city

A new node on Via Giulia. The school turns its public ground over to the street, and pulls Piazza Moretta into its courtyard.

Location: Via Giulia, Rome
Year: 2020
Programme: Secondary school + civic café
Role: Architect · design author
Studio: Sapienza Università di Roma

Render of the school courtyard with students walking past dark and white volumes — fig. 01: The internal courtyard. The black volume on the right contains the auditorium; the white wing holds classrooms.

Via Giulia is one of Rome's straightest streets, a Renaissance attempt to rationalise a tangled medieval fabric. It worked, briefly. Today, between the river and the historic centre, the street is mostly used as a route, not a place. The school site sits on a missing tooth in the block.

The project reads the city's matrix at three scales, nodes, routes, and plots, and treats the school as a new node. A pedestrian route runs through the building diagonally, opened to the public. The café spills into Piazza Moretta. The school's identity is performed against the street rather than hidden behind a wall.

Concept diagram showing nodes, poles, and reconstructive routes in central Rome — fig. 02: Concept. The map identifies existing nodes (Vatican, Castel Sant'Angelo) and proposes a new one at the school site, threaded by reconstructive and matrix routes.

A school is the only public building that everyone in the neighbourhood eventually passes through. Treat the ground floor like that, and the city changes shape around it.

Plan & elevation

Masterplan showing two adjacent plots and circulation — fig. 03: Masterplan. Two adjacent plots, separated by a residential bar, are stitched by a public passage. Numbered programme: classrooms (1), labs (2), library (3), café (4), administration (5), auditorium (6), playing field (8).

Elevations to Via Giulia and Piazza Moretta — fig. 04: Elevations. Via Giulia (top) holds the rhythm of the historic neighbours; Piazza Moretta (bottom) shows the recessed entry to the new public passage.

Section details and facade construction — fig. 05: Façade construction details (Section A through to right elevation). Concrete beam, riveted facade panel, laser-cut grating, concrete ceiling.

Interior render of the café with double-height space and steel mezzanine — fig. 06: The café. Double-height, with a steel mezzanine, open to the piazza when the school is closed.

The street elevation does what historic Roman elevations do, it lines up with the neighbours, holds the cornice, respects the rhythm of openings. But the section pulls back. A double-height café opens out to the piazza, then folds inward. The school's classrooms sit above and behind this public layer, accessed by their own staircase.

What I'm working out in this project, and again later in the master's thesis, is the question of how a single building can change the synchrony of a neighbourhood. Not by being big, but by being permeable.