Introduction
Of all building materials and their respective histories in culture and material science, concrete is perhaps one the more confounding. Shaped and transformed like a plastic or molten metal, concrete embodies a catalytic geology, fossilizing inertia, gravity, weight, longevity, and time. The consequence, a poetic manifestation of pervasive use, from the banal and utilitarian to the monumental and spectacular — a binding mortar in masonry and ceramics, a structural frame of columns, foundations, and floor slabs, a facade of precast panels or béton brut, an infrastructure of roads, tunnels, bridges, and dams. What timber is to the primitive hut, the post and lintel, concrete is to both utility and monumentality, the arch, dome, and vault; with application and performance as versatile as the human imagination.
The Rome Concrete Poetry Hall invites entrants to project and cast their own imagination in the formation of a multipurpose concrete building in historic Rome. The siting harkens to both the history of concrete and of monumentality in the context of antiquity and western civilization’s cultural heritage. At the center of a piazza, transcribed by a railway, the project necessitates subterranean excavation, recontextualizing Rome's archaeological past. Successful projects conscientiously engage the technological and cultural possibilities of concrete as a building medium within this framework. The jury showed preference to projects that explore the spatial, material, structural, conceptual, and cultural agency of this ever expanding building science.
Competition results in media publications
1st Prize Winner
Rome Concrete Poetry Hall
The participation to contests comes from the will to report with different ideas and ways to think about architecture. The contests allows you to investigate and address different issues, putting you constantly in a challenge. It is a processing project tool. It is a way to implement your project capacity, thanks to a constant confrontation with other project outcomes.
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Jury feedback summary
The success of the first place proposal for the Rome Concrete Poetry Hall is its complete denial of the architecture as object, fully accepting the subterranean nature of the project and opting instead to create space through subtractions and boolean operations beneath the plaza. The project lays bare the site, revealing only a composition of rectilinear cuts and a circular hole in the ground.
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2nd Prize Winner
Rome Concrete Poetry Hall
The competition gives an impulse to search for new approaches to architecture. It is a way to express our commitment to humanistic ideas and an active professional attitude to architecture. This attitude gives guidelines for design of rational structures and sensible spaces throughout free search and common sense.
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Russian Federation
Jury feedback summary
The second place entry for the Rome Concrete Poetry Hall stood apart in the competition for its interrogation of concrete beyond material and mass. The project exploits the monolithicity of concrete to reexamine the archetypical forms of the sphere and the spiral. Through a subversive topology, the project proposes an architecture that is radically interior.
3rd Prize Winner
Rome Concrete Poetry Hall
Architecture vision competitions provide a platform that allows the greatest flow of creativity and imagination. It allows architects to dream big and to spread their ideas to a global audience. The social sphere of the competitions encourages the intermingling of ideas across the world.
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Jury feedback summary
Third place is awarded to a project that aspires to create an existential narrative through the layering of context, material, and space. This layering is achieved through the poetic lens of metamorphosis; transcribing history, material, and experience through spatial sequencing from a Piazza to a Poetry Hall.
