Dutch architecture offices Global Architects and Bloot Architecture cooperated in an international team of architects and became third in the Vertical Spa in Rome International Architectural Competition. More images and architect’s description after the break.
The challenge; ARQUITECTUM and the Istituto Nazionale di Architettura want to bring a new element to the city’s debate and enigma: a hundred meter high tower, next to the Coliseum, which would present itself as an “important” element, but not necessarily monumental, which would expose Rome’s complexity by being a “vertical” Rome, which would assemble the facts and the enigmas lived and surviving in the Eternal City.
The building filters the perception of the urban context of Rome. The organisation of the program works as a purification-filter of the human body and mind.
The journey of the spa-experience starts at the top of the building. The first level of purification is to get elevated from the chaotic urban life. Through the filtering planes users descend the building like water dripping down and get filtered by the different spa functions. The space generated between the filtering planes, acts as a connecting void in which one program infiltrate into the other. In these voids one moves through the building and is constantly exposed to different “framed” views on the city of Rome.
