Article Index

Project 3: The renewal of the tiberine wood by Franco Purini, with the contribution of Elisabetta Bucci, Gianfranco Neri, Renato Partenope, Elio Pitzalis, Philippe Raymond, Marcello Sestito and Giordano Tironi

The third project has been proposed by the architect Franco Purini, with the contribution of Elisabetta Bucci, Gianfranco Neri, Renato Partenope, Elio Pitzalis, Philippe Raymond, Marcello Sestito and Giordano Tironi.
Find herebelow a short abstract from the author's report of the project; the complete original text (in Italian language) in PDF format can be read clicking on the side picture.
(Files .pdf require the installation of Acrobat Reader that can be downloaded for free HERE)

... Project description The idea of the wood was revealed to me as a writing made with sympathetic ink after having been struggled among many and many difficulties. ...
The vanished medieval Rome insistently stimulated my hand above all ...
The path towards the Middle Ages has been the architectonic theme of the isolation ... the formal revelation ... of the building dislikes that the uninterrupted town represses ...
"Isolating the island" has been translated, ... into the image of an isolated Wood, or rather fortified by means a frame of houses, echo and mirror image of the woods surrounding the Palatine hill, the Aventine or the Janiculum ones. ....
Actually my project is to realize a rational segregated place, an hospital or a leper hospital or ghetto o prison able to isolate itself against the surrounding attack of the healthy and normal people ... The internal room of the island will be again invaded by the ancient Tiberine Wood ...
This space will be full of an emerging sense and a constant warning of the imminence of a terrible event that is going to happen ...
And this idea of danger that radiates from the wood's axis reflects on the surface of the façades of the houses on the river and comes back harder ... I think that the realism of this proposal is not questionable, either from the town planning point of view and for the cost-benefits ratio. ...
... three final considerations. First, the isolation and the fortification of the island introduces to a re-consideration of the military universe as an ideal place of the projective geometry and of the consequent metallic hardness of the correspondences ...
Second, the place of a thing is always the non-place of some other one and vice versa. Third, the image is the place of the salvation of the sole image, that is there are no Tiberine banks to which land with a memory of serenity that is not made with the same substance than dream ...


1. Elevation


2. Building no.2: side elavation, mail elevation, plan, section

3. The tower


4. Plan

5. Axonometry

6. Building no.1

7. Elevation


8. General elevation