Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller

Ersela Kripa & Stephen Mueller

Founders Rome Prize
September 6, 2010–August 1, 2011
Profession
Partners, AGENCY Architecture, New York
Project title
Hackable Infrastructures: Inhabiting the Margins of Contemporary Rome
Project description

Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller will study the forced movement of the Romani in Rome, establishing an understanding of the contemporary city as a network of superimposed degrees of mobility, finding sites of convergence where the Romani and the Roman might benefit from cohabitation, and to propose infrastructural and architectural frameworks to enable the preservation and cohabitation of Roma and Roman culture. Drawing on a rich history of Roman infrastructural and civic typologies that have been repurposed over the course of the city’s legacy, and engaging the current objectives of the rapidly developing metropolis, Kripa and Mueller will investigate appropriate forms for such an intervention. Developing and testing their speculations of a hackable infrastructure for the contemporary city, they will benefit from direct contact with Roma and Sinti culture, its advocates, and the designers and planners of modern Rome to develop site-specific infrastructural interventions that address the intensifying Roma housing and sociological crisis.