Rome - Piazza Risorgimento

ROME - PIAZZA RISORGIMENTO

CUSTOMISED BIG PLANTERS FROM EUROFORM W

The visual backdrop of the great urban axes of Via Cola di Rienzo, Crescenzio, and Porcari, a preview of the nearby Piazza San Pietro—Piazza Risorgimento is a breathing space between the major pedestrian flows of Via Ottaviano and Via di Porta Angelica.
Born in the early 20th century with the Prati district, evolving in the 1950s with the creation of new spaces for the car-centric city, and reorganized for the Jubilee 2000, this square has always had a hybrid nature, making it a park, a crossroads, a natural island, and a transit space all at once.
Today, it is also a key hub for urban mobility, a “hinge” between the transit routes of the northwestern area of the city and the Lungotevere system, as well as the historic terminus of Rome’s tramway loop.
More than just a square, it is an archipelago formed over time, where fragments of different natures emerge: natural islands, flows of people, cars, buses, trams, a large central pedestrian area, and the equestrian monument to the Carabiniere.
"Working on public space has meant reflecting on how we will move in the city of tomorrow—at what speeds, with what perceptual mechanisms. It has meant imagining possible new forms of social interaction, new communities, new uses and relationships, redefining the connection between city and nature," explains Alessandro Cambi, partner at IT’S.

With an area of 18,000 square meters, the square is reimagined as an urban ecosystem capable of creating new environmental, social, and perceptual relationships with its surroundings, fostering new symbiotic connections.
"The intervention aims to work in continuity with the traces of a place with multiple identities, embracing the genealogy of a palimpsest city that has always built itself upon itself—without erasure, layering over time, animated by an archaic building practice that we now rediscover as contemporary, based on repositioning and the continuous reuse of its own signs and materials," adds Cambi.
By drawing on existing structures and reinterpreting their materiality, the project seeks to create new environmental relationships and alternative ways of using space.
In the pedestrianized areas, asphalt is replaced with stabilized crushed stone, a compacted natural soil that restores the ground to a more primary, natural state, improving water permeability and facilitating better absorption of heavy rainfall.
New trees and urban macro-objects punctuate the space, activating alternative uses and fostering new social interactions.
The square will temporarily host In Orbita, one of the projects designed for the 2024 Rome Architecture Festival by OUT Architecture: an installation conceived as a platform for sharing, curated by Devoto Design.
The new Piazza Risorgimento aims to be many places in one: a park, a square, a new urban ecosystem.