Respublica Occupied
architecture, 3D modeling, rendering, CAD drawing, collage technique
Respublica Occupied is not simply a project of design, but also a political tool that challenges and questions assumptions about cultural institutions and the public realm that are no longer relevant today. The year of 2022 calls for drastic change and an urge to confront obsolete practices and beliefs of institutions and powers that had been commonly construed around the globe. As part of the same revolutionary drive during the 1960s in Brazil, Lina Bo Bardi, went on to make iconoclastic architecture. Respublica Occupied examines Bo Bardi’s repertoire and absorbs her radical thinking to interrogate the current approach of designing, organizing, and making culture today.
(Thesis project supervised by Peter Testa).
collage drawing 01
The project takes on the Prado Museum Extension and the existing Hall of Realms, in Madrid, Spain. It proposes to treat the existing fabric of the building, which echoes the historical ruins of radically transformed monarchies, as an opportunity for iconoclastic and monumental intervention.
exploded facade + cutout axon + plan drawing
Iconoclastic in the sense of eliminating all cultural elite snobbery and monumental in the sense of the collective, of civic dignity. It produces a radical upheaval to the existing building through a series of combinations of hall and loggia typologies, opening up the museum to the city and the city to the museum. Public spaces of freedom and democratic potential are achieved by suspending, removing, and reoccupying parts of the old Hall of Realms, as well as redistributing its program to a new monumental structure.
collage drawing 02
ground floor plan
second floor plan
longitudinal section
cross section
site plan