Palazzo delle Esposizioni

Rome - Italy

Type

  • Culture

Location

  • Rome - Italy

Year

  • 2003 – 2007

Client

  • Municipality of Rome, Palaexpo special agency Palaexpò

Activities

  • Preliminary and final design, working drawings  

Costs

  • 15 M euro

Area

  • 4.200 m2

The project for the extension of Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome was the first example of steel and glass architecture within the historical and monumental city centre. It started from the ambition to reconstruct the former Conservatory of the Palace designed by Pio Piacentini (1883) and then demolished during the 1930s renovations.

In terms of architecture, the project respects and enhances the whole building and its decorative elements, joining both minimalist and subtractive approaches. This enhancement aims to fully link the Conservatory to the institutional role of the building, and to functionally, technologically and architecturally integrate it within a 19th-century building.  

The design of the Piacentini Conservatory is an opportunity to redevelop the urban area behind the Palazzo and to reconnect it towards via Piacenza. These processes are supported by the inherent nature of the project and by the transparency and functional technological adequacy of the structure. 

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Externally, the chosen materials for the masonry base, the technical travertine volumes, the glass conservatory and the lightweight roof create a sort of bottom-up sequential dematerialization of the new Piacentini Conservatory. 

Moreover, the surprising symbolic effect between day and night lightening enhances the totally linear and volumetric simplicity and the detailed structural system used to suspend the glass ceiling.  

Being a large glass volume by day, at night the Conservatory appears as a dematerialized luminescent prism, a surprising “urban lantern” enhancing the exhibition functions and communicative possibilities of the building. 

The main building is a large block realized in panes of perfectly transparent, colorless and frameless low-emission laminated structural glass, supported by a system of vertical struts, specially designed anchors and tempered glass wind bracing elements. 

The horizontal floor is finally supported by large structural steel arches that restore the original vaulted outline of Piacentini's design. In addition to the extension, the project also envisages the reorganisation and restoration of the interior exhibition spaces of the Palazz