Thank you to the Makerspace!

The Makerspace empowered me, somebody with no model-building experience, to create an architectural model of a home in Rome, Italy that I am proud of—they even lent me the tools to make it happen. I am grateful to  David Keiser-Clark, Makerspace Program Manager, for offering guidance in this design project. This Neoclassical Modernist home was inspired by my time spent last spring studying abroad in Rome, Italy, and David helped me design this relatively low-tech model for my architecture class, taught by the great and powerful Professor Michael Lewis. As an economics major, I had never created anything like this, so I enlisted David to help me solve some practical problems that were preventing me from getting the design to look as accurate as I’d hoped. Specifically, I needed help to understand how to get the proportions of arches to look correct, and how I could properly cut and fill these voids. Due to the nature of the project, I wanted this to be done by hand, so David’s first idea of 3D printing the walls was not practical, so he worked with me to trace voussoirs into both the poster board walls and the plexiglass windows, a material that he referred me to. In addition, we grappled with the idea of how to properly include a glass dome in my model. David had the wonderful idea to buy a clear plastic bowl from Walmart and then set the scale of the entire model off of the measurement of this piece. David and I had many ideas about how to create the most interesting model possible, but his genius lies in the simplicity of his solutions to these practical problems. Being well-versed in the world of 3D printing, he was tempted to create bespoke parts for the project, but I was impressed with his restraint, ingenuity, and creativity to use more common items to solve these issues using a fraction of the time, labor, and resources.  In addition to his more high-tech tools in the Makerspace, David keeps a plethora of different tools that made this project possible and accessible for a student like me. He has compasses, saws, scoring equipment, clamps, and countless other items that allow students to have a one-stop shop for making their creative vision into a reality. I cannot thank David enough for all of the help and support, and I would recommend that anyone at the College and beyond come check out what he is doing, as it is extremely interesting and unique in a college landscape. Below, I included a write-up on my project for anyone interested. Thank you David & the Makerspace!

Jack Murphy
Modern Architecture
Professor Lewis
11 November 2024

Neoclassical Modernist Home in Rome, Italy

My vacation house in Rome, Italy features Classicist architecture with a modernized design that subverts the traditional Roman order to provide the home with aesthetic and functional attributes never seen in ancient Rome. More specifically, the house is located in the Aurelio District above Vatican City at 41º53’21.56” N, 12º27’02.88” E. This undeveloped plot of grassland (1.2 acres) is located directly across the street from Villino Algardi, a government-owned villa where meetings are held. Villino Algardi sits inside Villa Doria Pamphili, a massive public park where Romans escape the city and have picnics with their families. The house faces north and sits at 246 feet of elevation, 0.95 miles away from Vatican City (50 feet of elevation), providing spectacular views of the entirety of downtown Rome. This area provides me with a unique location just outside of the city, views of the scenic city, and distance from the highly traditional architectural standards that my home violates. 

In essence, my home’s exterior is meant to mimic buildings like the Pantheon, Parthenon, and countless other Roman Temples. It features a portico and dome similar in silhouette to the Pantheon, but I decided to make the “rotunda” square due to the difficulty in creating a circular floorplan for home applications. To allude to this building, I included arches on all four sides with glass beneath to provide excellent natural light into all rooms. The ground floor features a dividing wall in the middle, with a great room in front and a bedroom in the back. The great room includes a dining room and kitchen with an island in the middle, allowing me to entertain guests during dinner parties essential to Roman culture. In total, this room sums up to 332 square feet, giving me space for indoor functions and direct access to the portico for aperitivo (afternoon cocktail hour) as the sun sets over the Roman cityscape. The rear half of the ground floor features a bedroom, bathroom (accessible from both sides of the ground floor), and walk-in closet, allowing for comfortable living for me and my future wife. I chose to put the bedroom on the western side of the home to prevent the morning sun from waking me too early as I relax on vacation. The one bathroom is located on the east side of the home, with the option to soak in the morning sun as you prepare for the day or to pull blinds down for extra privacy. Back in the great room, a staircase climbs the dividing wall to allow access to the semi-circular loft inside of the glass dome, overlooking all of Rome. This room includes a sectional couch and TV and serves as an excellent living space to watch sunsets or stargaze with friends and loved ones. This sectional can also pull out to allow for additional sleeping space for guests of the home looking for one of the most beautiful and unique living arrangements imaginable. The loft is semicircular, allowing for natural light to permeate into the great room as you cook lunch and enjoy days off on the weekend. A long basalt-cobblestone driveway connects the property to Via Aurelia Antica, cutting under an ancient Roman aqueduct’s arch that provides privacy from the passing traffic. 

One of the chief inspirations for this home was Hagia Sophia of the East Roman Empire. This building collapsed 21 years after its construction in 558 AD due to the difficulty of supporting a round dome on a rectangular rotunda. This problem led to the invention of pendentives, which use arches on all 4 sides and diagonal arches across the hypotenuse of the rotunda to distribute force away from weak points towards the middle of the rectangular floorplan and into the corners of the structure. I decided to use a light glass dome for reasons listed later, so pendentives are unnecessary due to their juxtaposition with the heavier brick-and-mortar dome of Hagia Sophia. Interestingly, this building has been modernized in its own way, as it was converted into a mosque in 1453 following the Ottoman invasion of Constantinople. While I didn’t end up needing to use pendentives, Hagia Sophia served as a major inspiration for the silhouette of my home as it was the first time that a round dome was placed on a rectangular building in any part of the Roman Empire.

The use of glass serves as a way to improve upon traditional Roman architecture using modern materials. Firstly, glass allows for the use of arches in the design, tying in the aforementioned inspiration of Hagia Sophia with the practicality of an enclosed structure. Furthermore, glass allows me to subvert the ideas of modern architecture into the form of classicism. I found myself fascinated by the transparency of the Seagram Building and the Crown Hall (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) and wanted to incorporate this into my home. In addition, the oculus of the Pantheon served as inspiration for the dome, as I took this idea and wanted to maximize natural lighting past what Roman architects were capable of due to material limitations. Ancient Romans never had access to the quantity of glass that we do today, so I wanted to use the figure of a classical dome with the transparency of glass to allow for a unique living space in the loft and beautiful natural lighting in the great room. To directly reference traditional Roman orders, I used monolithic columns on the portico, but again subverted it by using black marble, something untraditional to ancient Rome. To take this idea to the next level, omitted almost all aspects of Roman orders, including the capital, base, and entablature to provide a more minimalist aesthetic that is free of ornament. The exterior of the home is constructed of black painted stainless steel, juxtaposing it with the marble cladding of ancient Rome and Renaissance architecture, again using traditional Roman form with modern material functionality.

The fundamental idea of this home was to combine modern materials and aspects of modern functionality into a more classicist design. I found myself interested in the irony of this home, as modern architecture was in a way in direct opposition to classism. The challenge was to create a home that is both classicist and modern, styles many would argue are mutually exclusive. Prof. Lewis challenged me to design the interior of the building first and to avoid trying to cram a floorplan into a predetermined exterior, but in avoiding this, I actually found the home to become more interesting. By clinging to the idea of having a dome, I was forced to think about how I could use the upper floor, leading to my favorite idea for the whole home in the semicircular domed loft. Like all great architects, limitations forced me to become creative and create novel solutions to functional problems. While my home is largely in the form of a Roman temple, something less than ideal for living, it actually is quite suited for a home as it has all of the necessities that one could need for a small vacation home. While this design is far from the most daring, I would argue that it encompasses many of the ideas that we have gone over in class as crucial to the inception of modern architecture and applies them in a different direction than seen before.

Exhibit 1

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit 2

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit 4

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-pendentive-dome-177310

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit 5

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit 6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagram_Building

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit 7

https://www.johndesmond.com/blog/design/mies-van-der-rohe-part-ii-the-mind-behind-the-steel/