Early this year, the City of Rome announced the winning design of an international competition aimed at the redevelopment of the Via dei Fori Imperiali and surrounding Imperial Forum archaeological sites. Labics, a design office cofounded by Francesco Isidori and Maria Claudia Clemente, was selected for their proposed promenade, which will improve access to and understanding of this iconic setting for both residents and tourists by connecting monuments spanning the Colosseum to the city center.

"The central archaeological area is one of the places in the city where the signs and traces of the most significant eras of Roman history clearly overlap, from the most ancient to the most recent times," Isidori and Clemente explain. "This place, therefore, appears as a large palimpsest in which different scripts coexist and overlap in different ways." To make the space more intelligible and physically accessible to a wide audience, their design plan includes walkways, bicycle paths, green spaces, and balconies, creating greater interaction and connection with the surroundings.

Considering that the setting represents the physical and symbolic core of the city, not to mention the level of knowledge and materials Isidori and Clemente have amassed on the area through their study and reflection for the competition, the topic presented an ideal area to explore with their architectural design studio students at Cornell in Rome this semester where they are both serving as Architecture Visiting Critics. They endeavored, however, to give the students additional freedom and took a more experimental attitude than the original design brief allowed. They challenged the students to reflect on the role of the central archaeological area in the city today, which has become a large tourist destination: How is it possible to return this part of the city to the local community and contribute to the quality of available public space?

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