Location: Rome, Italy
Year: 2011
Team: raumlabor (Francesco Apuzzo, Jan Liesegang) with Christian Göthner, Leonard Börger, Olga Maria Hungar, Samuel Dias Carvalho
Program and client: Comissioned by MAXXI, Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, in context of the exhibition RE-cycle. Strategies for Architecture, City and Planet 1. December 2011 – 29. April 2012

[Text description provided from the project statement on the official website of raumlabor – All rights to the content belong to the original author]

The OFFICINA ROMA is a villa entirely build out of trash. It consist of a sleeping room, a kitchen and a work shop. The plan lacks a living room, a comfort zone, instead there is an empty work shop in the center. OFFICINA ROMA is an experimental building practice, build within an one week long workshop with 24 high school students from all over Italy.

The building is composed as a collage: A kitchen entirely build out of old bottles, the sleeping room with walls from used car doors, the workshop using wooden windows and old furniture and the main roof set from old oil barrels and used dry wall profiles.

The OFFICINA ROMA radiates an atmosphere of urgency; a turning point. It talks about the essential necessity to question our lifestyle, based on individuality, completion (competition), growth and exploitation of natural resourses. Although situated in the very dynamic and exclusive garden of the MAXXI, the design speaks of deadlocks, interdependencies and the need for more fundamental and tougher negotiations over privileges in our future society.

Within the five month of the RE-cycle exhibition the OFFICINA ROMA will host a series of workshops and discussions on topics such as experimental building practices, alternative living concepts and recycling design.

After the exhibition the „officina roma“ was torn down and reused by the Rome-based architecture collective Orizzontale

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© Image credits: raumlabor

raumlaborberlin website