Platform_Architecture_and_Design_1.pdf

34 FRAMES
Let’s speak about the strategic decision by the client
to site their headquarters right in the Tiburtine
station area.
BNP Paribas analyzed the current distribution of BNL
branches and through research into different areas and
assessed the Tiburtine area as the best for concentrating
different offices in a single building which is important for size
and visibility. The urban strategy of concentrating a tertiaryproductive
activity at the top of such an important regional
infrastructure like the high-speed Rome-Tiburtine station is
part of a larger more virtuous urban operation that aims to
reduce the use of private transport with a single choice, to
graft it onto a part of the city that has already concentrated
public infrastructures thus connecting them with both the
city and the rest of the country, and at the same time initiating
a redevelopment of urban buildings as well as freeing them
from the organizational function, so that they can now take on
different and vital roles within the city.
Materials and form: lightness and dynamic
monumentality. How can these two coexist within a
single architectural framework?
Architecture is a medium in which ideas, values,
responsibility, ethics and last but not least aesthetics, or rather
“beauty” so as not to use an overworked word in Italy, all
coexist. Architecture has to be the question or answer to a
place, a context, a need and possibly transform reality into a
story so that it can “belong” to everyone, in that it participates
in the imagination, perception and even the use of a part
of the city. Two looks, two aspects. One which wants to be
represented as lightness, reflection and fading away, where
the building is superimposed on a layer of infrastructure
thus becoming the apex, the highest point. Reflection and/
or the theme of perception-interaction call to mind several
works of art from this century from Buren (still outstanding
in the recent work for MAMO on the cover of Le Corbusier’s
Cité Radieuse in Marseille) to Eliasson (his interesting recent
installation “Contacts” at the FLV in Paris). These experiences
in the field of art have an effect in that they create a dialogue
with the body of the city and architecture, and they implement
different ways of perceiving reality.
In the end, everything takes on an idea of lightness and contemporary dynamic “monumentality” when the building begins to
engage in dialogue with itself in its context and the very nature of the context in which it is compared , it presents or stages it
and then distances itself.