St. Mary of the Presentation

Do you remember the Jubilee of 2000?

Our project, the second place winner of the competition “50 churches for Rome 2000” promoted by the Vicariate of Rome on the occasion of the Jubilee, consisted in the realization of a “subsidiary Church with recreational and sports functions”, in the Quartaccio area, a marginal portion of the urban fabric of Rome, socially fragile and in which there were no aggregative places.

The social degradation and the urban trivialization of the district of Quartaccio, in this context, were opposed, however, the beautiful landscape of the valley overlooking the side of Via di Torrevecchia, and the project lot was just embedded in the transition between these two worlds. This is why the real challenge of the project was to connect these two dimensions: the social fragility of the neighborhood of popular residences and the beauty of the Roman rural landscape. The project lives on the relationship and contrast between two architectural organisms: the civic part appears as a “presence”, a volume that, in its abstraction -and introversion- seems an object “emerged”, as belonging to the surrounding landscape; the sacred part is configured vice versa as the project of a void, an “absence”, to welcome the inhabitants of the neighborhood and offer them a place of aggregation but also give life to a spiritual place linked to the loss and search for themselves which the intimate and labyrinthine dimension of the project invites.