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summer workshops

ROMA 2025: Infrastructures and Interruptions in the Year of the Jubilee

Jun 20 – Jun 28, 2025

Rome

James Piacentini

Research Question

Ten years ago, twenty five design schools, including Columbia GSAPP, jointly proposed a vision for the future of Rome, a city known mostly for its past. Roma 20-25 was an ambitious international investigation across neighborhood, urban, and regional scales, dividing the Comune di Roma’s extents into a 5 by 5 grid of 10km by 10km square parcels, and assigned one parcel to each design team. The teams were tasked to think both internally about their interventions and holistically about how these projects situate themselves amongst the broader design proposal. The projects were compiled into an exhibit at the MAXXI (National Museum of 21st Century Arts) titled “Roma 20-25: New Life Cycles for the Metropolis” and accompanying published volume of the same name by Quodlibet.

The project drew both conceptual and logistical inspiration from the 1978 collaboration and exhibition Roma interrotta (Rome interrupted), which saw a dozen architects and designers working from the Nolli plan to re-imagine equal subsections of the center of Rome. The exhibition was re-installed at the MAXXI in 2014, and created a direct correspondent to dialogue with the proposals of Roma 20-25, which sought to extend the design laboratory beyond the historic city center and encompass the broader metropolitan territory (50km by 50km). Now, ten years later, 2025 has arrived, and the projects warrant another re-evaluation.

What reflections and retrospective understandings can we draw from the last ten years of politics, culture, and urbanism in Rome as they relate to the Roma 20-25 proposals? How do the infrastructural upheaval of the Linea C metro construction and the preparations for the 2025 Jubilee reshape how life in Rome operates in the context of these reflections, and what do they say about the way architects and urbanists develop the future(s) of a city known so well for its past? What can we infer about the Rome of 2035 or 2050 as a result of our work?

Methodology and Process

The year 2025 marks an incredibly visible and costly investment in massive infrastructural commitments in Rome, and the year-long procession of the Catholic Jubilee. The pressures to prepare the city for the pilgrimages and the highly visible urban interventions across the city drastically (though temporarily) altered Rome’s physical and demographic complexion and provide a meaningful framework through which to evaluate past speculations on urban form.

This workshop will begin with a deep reading and analysis of both Roma interrotta and Roma 20-25 as students inhabit and draw key sites throughout the city. We will tour a select set of significant urban and national spaces and monuments in Rome with local experts, and reflect on these sites’ relationships with the speculations of Roma 20-25 and current urban and infrastructural interventions as well as the cultural impacts of the Jubilee. As part of our work, we will visit the MAXXI - itself a site of contemporary architectural significance - as well as a variety of other key sites of proposed intervention throughout the city and important museums and monuments such as the Capitoline Museums, Villa Borghese, and Ara Pacis. Students will explore and learn how historical and contemporary layers of architectural, urban, and artistic intervention have played out across these sites as well as other major sections of the city, and will be tasked with analyzing the real and imagined conditions of change through multiple forms of media.

Outputs and Findings

Students will create an analytical case study of the Roma 20-25 exhibition and proposals, and use this to generate a new reflection for what the next ten years may look like for Rome. This will take two forms: 1) an interactive digital archive of drawings, texts, photographs, videos, mixed-media collage, and other modes of representation based on students’ interests and skills and 2) a compiled report/book documenting our process and work. We will have the opportunity to discuss our reflections with local architects and historians, and, time permitting, stage a small exhibition of our work and print our findings.

download the workshop outline

Other 2025 workshops

Archiving as Exercise	Sky Gellatly, Karen Wong	Portland, Oregon	Aug 2 – Aug 8, 2025
MONSOON COMMONS in BENGALURU	Sonal Beri, Sandro Marpillero	Bengaluru	Jul 21 – Aug 8, 2025
Flashing Arcs and Crater-Clouds: Revisiting Volcanology in Southern Italy	Mark Wasiuta	Southern Italy	Jul 1 – Jul 10, 2025
Muddy Makings – Natural Materials in Digital Commons	Lola Ben-Alon, Olga Carcassi	Across New York City	Jun 15 – Jun 30, 2025
Exploring Metal Casting and Collaborative Experimental Preservation	Mika Tal, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Kate Allen	Birmingham, AL	Jun 2 – Jun 13, 2025