Wall Walk Workshop

The Wall Walk Workshop was a project headed by the Roman college Roma Tre in collaboration with American colleges University of Arkansas, Philadelphia University, University of Miami, and Temple University. The one week workshop looked at sections of the under-utilized Aurelian Wall which surrounds the inner city and how we, as architects, could possible bring life back to the wall. My group, headed by Andrea Simitch from Cornell University and Federico Desideri from Roma Tre, looked at the section of the Aurelian Wall from Porta San Paolo to the Tiber River.

Aurelian Walls san paolo Tiber River wall walk Rome Roma Tre cemetary mountain video pink brick presentation

The section went through the Testaccio neighborhood, known for its hardworking, blue-collar people.

Before we began to design, we first looked at how to work with something already existing. Using bricks and key words such as "bend", "fracture", and "smooth", we first modified the smallest units of the wall. Using various items, tools, and our own hands, we recreated the bricks in their texture, their size, and other components.

After the brick excersise, we finally turned our attention to the wall itself. I worked on Monte Testaccio, a man-made mountain behind a military cemetary. I proposed we carve out part of the mountain and create it into a park like setting and connect it back to the wall using a bridge over the cemetary.

Each member of the group proposed how to connect an area near the wall back to the wall and, together, we weaved a path over, through, and around the wall to create one, singular walkway that connected San Paolo to the Tiber River.

After a few refinements, we had completed our plans for the "Wall that Went for a Walk."

The final model showed how our walkway intervention would bring together the different sides of the wall, how the walkway would move over the wall, bend into cemetaries, bridge mountain gaps, and create space where before there was only rubble.

In addition to my general contribution to the group work, I made the group's "Wall that Went for a Walk" graphic, presented the final project, and made the following video, which encompasses the week's worth of work into about a minute and a half.