Forum des vestiges
The past of rome
The project has its origins in the history of Rome, a thousand-year-old city that has seen its monuments and emblems become vestiges over the centuries. Thus it is through the term of forum that the project was impregnated with Ancient Rome. More than an emblematic place of Roman architecture, the forum represents a space – virtual or not - of free trade, socialization and debate.
Located in the heart of the Villa Medici’s gardens, The “forum des vestiges' dominates the city and seeks to dialogue with this omnipresent past, harmoniously mixing memory and contemporaneity. In this square space, fragments of ancient columns spring from the ground, silent witnesses of a bygone past.
The project weaves a link with these historical remains, reinterpreting them through a new materiality. The wooden columns, seeking to match the mass of the stone, draw an imposing monolith. A timeless conversation takes place between the immutable and the immortal, facing the ephemeral and the changing. Stone and wood take root in its physical and historical setting, creating a work that resonates with the past and embraces the present.
Living the present
Like the forum, this device wants to be a place of life, exchanges and representations. The drawing takes up the principle of a temple, where a colonnade forms a peristyle, offers a stroll at the border between inside and outside, revealing a diversity of spaces playing with framing and games of shadows and lights. We discover in the hollow of the columns, seats allowing the user to isolate himself. At the heart of the project stands a wooden monolith, housing a long table, a historical object of conviviality.
It is sitting on stools around this everyday object, protected from the sun by a velum, that this space invites the visitor to share a moment.
The half-circle floor reinforces this idea of socialization and offers a platform for sitting and exchanging. Animated by the curtain, playing the role of stage background, the theatrical dimension of the project appears and the visitor becomes a spectator during a performance. The modular furniture reinforces the flexibility of the space, allowing various uses and appropriations of the garden and forum, creating a place of meetings and adaptable sharing.
Thus, the hut becomes much more than a simple wooden construction: it revives this close relationship between the past and the present, between memory and the future.
Like a pavilion
This cabin with the appearance of a pavilion finds its proportions and limits in the relationship it maintains with the garden responding to the rigorous geometry formed by hedges.
Beyond the poetic dimension sought, the drawing was directed by the desire to facilitate the construction of the project. Thus the essence of this architecture lies in the repetition of a column module surmounted by a lintel. Made only of plywood panels in maritime pine from the Landes, the different parts are assembled with each other by a system of notches. A constructive system made possible by cutting wood panels using a CNC numerical control. This choice allowed rapid on-site assembly by embedding parts, thus reducing the use of hardware. The final result is a temple measuring 12.5 meters long, 6.25 meters wide and 5 meters high, adapted to its environment and respecting the aesthetic integrity of the historic site.
Human and sharing
Finally, this hut embodies the encounter between a hand and a material, a culture and a nature. It also becomes a place of sharing. Unlike a traditional project, the architects were both designers and builders of their work. Accompanied by three journeymen of duty, the time of construction on site was a real period of exchanges and transmission of know-how. It’s a moment of collective invention.
