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The Rome Concrete Poetry Hall architecture competition challenged participants with bringing the world’s most popular construction material, concrete, back to its roots, and create a building in the heart of Rome that expressed poetry in architecture. Through the use of this endlessly versatile material, participants were invited to project and cast their own imagination in the formation of a multipurpose concrete building in historic Rome. The first place winners are a team of students from Politecnico di Milano who took a subterranean approach, creating space through subtractions and boolean operations beneath the plaza. Through this act of burial, these familiar architectural forms are transformed, creating an abstract mirror beneath the streets of the city.

Our second place entry was from a Russian company entitled Project Institute "ARENA" which aspired to create an existential narrative through the layering of context, material, and space. This layering was achieved through the poetic lens of metamorphosis; transcribing history, material, and experience through spatial sequencing from a Piazza to a Poetry Hall. The third place project was also a student entry, this time from the University of Waterloo in Canada. The jury felt this project stood out due to its interrogation of concrete beyond material and mass, exploiting the monolithicity of concrete to reexamine the archetypical forms of the sphere and the spiral.

To see the winning designs and the jury comments in full, visit the Rome Concrete Poetry Hall website.

1st Prize


2nd Prize


3rd Prize



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