Roma 20-25 at GSAPP – Seminar
This seminar will articulate a conversation about how to creatively recombine a city’s productive tensions between the “real” world and “imagined” representations of its spatiality. Paradigmatic exhibitions on architecture and the city, spanning an arc of 35 years until the present, will provide base material for reinterpretation.
The National Museum of the Arts of 21st Century in Rome (MAXXI) is promoting such conversation about contemporary architecture and the city, by inviting 12 Italian universities and 12 foreign ones to study different areas of a larger scale territory surrounding Rome. The GSAPP is one of the 24 participating institutions. The challenge posited by “ROMA 20 – 25. New cycles of life for the metropolis” is to elaborate research topics that hold together the clarity of a manifesto and parameters for a design project, engaging a territory that extends more than 25 km from the historical city center, also adopting a temporal projection of 10 years ahead.
Lecture: New York City’s Inner Periphery
In partnership with three Italian Schools of Architecture (Venice, Ancona, Reggio Calabria) and the Parsons School of Design Strategies, Sandro presented the works that MPA have realized in context of the Bloomberg administration’s reshaping of New York City, referencing a recently published article on Lotus International: “Changing New York 2001-13. Design as Competitive Advantage.” Sandro’s lecture followed the one given by David Burney (past-Commissioner of the NYC Department of Design and Construction, now Professor at Pratt Institute). The title “An Inside Narrative in Two Acts: A Public Space + An Institution” referred to the Bicycle and Pedestrian Improvement Project at Queens Plaza and the Elmhurst Public Library (both in Queens), which include collaborations with artists Michael Singer and Allan McCollum. Public commissions at urban design and institutional scale were also discussed through other MPA projects under construction, such as the New Stapleton Waterfront, and the Children Museum’s Lightweight Structures at Sag Harbor (both in Staten Island).