Piazza dei Cinquecento Alberi. Interweaving Uses and Spaces for Rome’s Central Station

The design research developed for the new Piazza dei Cinquecento in Rome proved to be an opportunity to rethink, starting from the defining features of the urban layout, a strategic place; the chance to provide a new order and redraw one of the largest public spaces of Rome’s city center, redrawing the hierarchy within its different landmarks. The guiding idea was to give a better comprehension of the access to the historic city, devising a clear subdivision for the ground of the new public infrastructure, inserted between two main arterial roads: via Giolitti and via De Nicola, potential mechanisms of a renewed experience of the square that starts from its edges and reaching towards its core. The renewed square – defined by the mineral sett pavement by the main station building and the garden of five hundred trees (cinquecento alberi) - appears to be a large carpet, where multiple uses interweave demonstrating the idea of shared space. Piazza dei Cinquecento, as main transport and pedestrian hub of the city, discloses an architectural stratification that is both horizontal and vertical in the powerful sequence of different infrastructural areas, their intersection with the system of green, buildings and monuments of historical, archaeological and cultural value that insist on the square.