RhOME for denCity at AU2014

This year, just a week ago, I had the opportunity to present the RhOME for denCity project at the Autodesk Idol, an event within the Autodesk University in Las Vegas.
RhOME, by Roma Tre University, participated to the Solar Decathlon Europe 2014 in France, and actually won the international contest, for the happiness of all of us who worked several months, and several nights, at the project, and for the pride of the entire University, and Country.

What is Solar Decathlon. It’s an international competition about sustainable architecture that deeply analyses and evaluates a project as to ten different categories: Architecture, Engineering and Construction, Energy Efficiency, Communication and Social Awareness, Urban Design, Transportation and Affordability, Sustainability, Innovation plus Comfort Conditions, House Functioning, Electrical Energy Balance.

20 teams are selected all over the world to participate, and this year the organization asked all the teams to define a dwelling solution for their own Country or city of origin.

So we had to design a project for the city of Rome, a home for Rome, that means we had to face the complexity and the contradictions of the city and of Italy.

We decided to settle our project in the city slums, such as this one in the picture, where poverty and degradation meet history and beauty.

And we obviously had to design for the Mediterranean climate, which is complex, because we have to protect our buildings from cold as well as from hot weather, so that the sun is both friend and enemy.

Moreover, they asked us to design a complete, affordable, integrated urban solution, but also to extract a prototype, scale 1:1, of a single apartment, to be built in just 10 days.

So, for those who think that a sketch, an idea, an intuition, is almost where the architect’s work starts and ends, maybe it’s time to change the slant.

If we want to design the future, we have to design a process, open to innovation and able to face complexity.
That’s why we decided to move from a traditional linear model to a radial one, where the design is collaborative, and where the decathletes, the architects, are in-between figures, just between the project, obviously managed in a BIM shared platform, and the specialist point of view, that is often the greatest enemy of innovation.

That’s how we managed to define a complete model of the house, a constructive model, with all the real components of the project, that gave us the possibility to foresee and solve in advance the possible issues concerning production, and to detect on time the clashes between the systems to be installed

Managing the assembly phase on site and getting, at last, a totally functioning house in so short a time.

That’s how we also managed to research, design and prototype new, innovative and integrated solar production systems, such as the thermodynamic baluster and the photovoltaic shading screen.

That’s how we can define a sustainable solution, a solution that takes into consideration the complete lifecycle of every material within the process, creating virtuous cycles of regeneration, from waste into new resources.

That’s how we, as architects, can manage to ask our house to communicate the monitored data directly to the inhabitant, involving him in a process of ecological learning.

That’s how we can think of a smartcity within the city of Rome.

That’s how we reach beauty

and how we can try to offer our own Country the vision we have of the future.