This small building, three storeys high, is a functional completion of the Hydrobiological Campus of the second university of Rome, Tor Vergata.
This side of the Campus is an independent structure which, for its specific issues, has been settled on the edge between countryside and town. This way, it has been possible to exploit open green spaces, such as the large lawn facing the centre plaza of the station, where new buildings for the laboratories are to be seen.
Despite the reduced dimensions, our intervention aims to be a seminal element to trigger a dynamism of events, potentially promoters of the transformation.
Abstracted from the context, the building of laboratories rejects mimesis, analogy or building typology, looking rather for materic texture relations with a given context, urban as well as natural, where it seems to have occurred casually.
It is not the research of external references to define the volumes’ articulation of the building, while it is rather a process, starting from the dimensions and the simple form of the nearby barns, adapting it to the work environments devoted to the research, to the rationalization of the facilities, to the optimization of the internal spaces, according to a view of a rigid economy of cubature as well as of the costs. A continuous staircase connects all the stores, by following the southern pierced wall.
The glass projection in the meeting room protects the entrance space, by propelling toward the undefined space of a square, where the building itself becomes a new essential boundary.
