S10 SMdP GRUPPO SATELLITE

GROUP NAME: Satellite
GROUP PROJECT: roma 10 s.maria d.pieta
GROUP MEMBERS: Shannon Hohlbein, Matt Holdsworth, Brad Kern, Neil Shah, Ian Siegel
ASSIGNMENT:  workshop 1

We begun with a walk beginning at Santa Maria della Pieta moving through Monte Mario into the countryside beyond. Our major observation was two different types of “edges of the city”:

One was a hard city edge; we found ourselves literally fenced into the city with no easy way into the woods on the opposite side of the fence.

And the second was a gentle transition from densely urban and pedestrian-occupied street into a vehicle-dominated suburb with no pedestrians, and then eventually wooded hillside beyond.

These transitions led us to think about how we wanted to distinguish the special space of the fountain at Santa Maria della Pieta from its surrounding grounds. Our goal was to re-energize the fountain as a social space, which is what it was built for in the first place,  so we agreed that the barrier should be spaced wide enough to allow some views in and out, but be dense enough to contain the space and distinguish it as important. A wall too dense would actually be anti-social, while a few palms that are not dense enough would just not suffice to enclose and distinguish the space.

Our next step was to collect all the palm branches we could find from around the complex and stand them up vertically around the fountain’s pavers. The palms, arranged in a radial fashion around the stone pavers of the sitting area, bend in toward the elephant, seemingly bowing down to it in veneration of its troubled but triumphant past, and allowing the mind’s eye to enclose the space in a domed form with a permeable, leafy surface.

Palms were chosen because they were an abundant resource around the complex, but would need to be removed from the grounds anyway and brought to a dumpster (or, even better, arranged into an installation to pay homage to the past).

The palms create enough of a barrier that the fountain space feels like something between interior and exterior space; still outside, but interior enough that it feels contained as something important. This was thought out carefully: on our group’s walk from city into countryside we noticed two distinct ways the city transitioned from urban into forest.

We also engaged the senses of sound and taste—sound, we hung a wind chime of several gold keys we picked up at a local hardware store (keys symbolic of the ones that imprisoned the patients for so many years).

And taste by pouring small cups of wine and lining them along the edge of the basin to be taken by our guests.

To us, wine meant two things—first off, this had used to be a fountain, and there needed to be a kind of flowing liquid to pay homage to its original purpose; and second, because the space was being christened as a social one, and over the past week, our favorite social function was unanimously the dinners we prepared together and ate accompanied with wine.