Italgas Centro degli Sport
This project aims to transform the derelict industrial zone of the Italgas complex in the Ostiense neighborhood outside the walls of Rome by revitalizing it into a thriving public park and recreational complex. The site situates itself along the Tiber River, surrounded by new efforts to create a successful university setting and facilities. This fitness center and park become a significant component in the ongoing efforts to regenerate and reoccupy the area.
Taking cues from the imposing grid shifts that occur around the site, as well as the local mechanical and industrial archaeology, the project positions constructed fragments that cut through the landscape and sandwich existing relics. This design strategy creates a friction as the figures, old and new, slip and slide towards the Tiber River and back into the urban fabric. This is seen as a way to help mediate between the university development on both sides of the Italgas complex and to create a significant linkage between them.
The primary building, a long tube-like structure, becomes a threshold as one moves along the circulatory wall, penetrates the tube into the fitness center, and exits back out onto the existing relic to view the soccer field. By moving linearly towards the river along the wall and then cutting laterally back across the site, one is reminded of the tracking movements characteristic of the assembly line and industrial processes that occurred on the site not so long ago.
The building is clad in materials native to the site– rusted beams, corrugated metal, and stained concrete. This is an interpretation and extrapolation of the site’s current situation as seen in the image to the right, where industrial detritus has become engulfed in a young canvas of vegetation. By harvesting the surviving structures while promoting this new idea growth and regeneration, a significant dichotomy arises between the innocence of nature and the harshness of rust and metal; clean and dirty, old and new.
