Rome Police Sation & Hotel

The project constitutes the exploration of how to sensitively design within an extraordinary historical context or how a historical setting could inform a contemporary design process.
The challenge was to smoothly integrate a new building within a historical stock in a physical and contextual realm, leading to the question if it's possible to integrate a historical structure within the interior space of a building.

The building defines a police-station with an included prison and a hanging 'emergency-hotel' for despoiled tourists. The historical asset is apprehended as materialized bodypart of history which is in perpetual deformation in the dimension of time. Therefore it is alienated, in the designprocess, through a skin which is wrapped over the existing historical structure, leading to its extrusion through the skin. An extrusion from past into presence. The resulting situation - of alienated historical matter- constitutes a setting in which the two mentioned functions (prison and hotel) began to arrange while subtly quoting Jeremy bentham's panopticon in the way they organize and relate to each other. The building constitutes a coexistence between  past and presence, demonstrating one of Rome's most intrinsic  features.