Phu Hoang and Rachely Rotem

Phu Hoang & Rachely Rotem

Founders Rome Prize
September 9, 2016–July 28, 2017
Profession
Directors, MODU, Brooklyn, New York
Assistant Professor Adjunct, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University (Hoang)
Project title
The Mutating Weathers of Rome’s Ruins
Project description

Contemporary ruins are unfinished or abandoned projects in various states of weather modification. Mutated by weather, new forms, and spaces have emerged, with a range of semi-exterior and semi-interior weather rooms” that offer architectural opportunities not intended by the original architects. Phu Hoang and Rachely Rotem’s work in Rome will focus on the architectural futures of contemporary ruins in which the relationship of architecture to weather is permeable and adaptable. Italy has over six hundred unfinished architectural and infrastructural projects; including incomplete highways, bridges, and buildings. In Rome, these unfinished projects range from a mile-long elevated track for an incomplete tramline to the structural armature of a vast natatorium. These ruins will serve as sites for architectural intervention. Weather drawings—which Hoang and Rotem have been exploring for years—will be created to generate design proposals that imagine alternative futures for Rome’s contemporary ruins.