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Summer Show 2025
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The Aqua Forum

Project details

Programme
Unit PG11
Year 4
Award
  • History and Theory Prize

The Aqua Forum seeks to rekindle Rome’s historic bond with its water heritage by reinterpreting the city’s urban fabric through the lens of its lifeblood, the Tiber River. Water in Rome has always been more than a resource; it is a cultural symbol that links past and present, nature and civilisation. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of Nature Culture, the project invites water and the Tiber River back into the city, crafting a hybrid ecosystem where Rome’s water systems and urban life coexist symbiotically.

At the heart of the proposal is the creation of a Tiber River Water Council and Bathhouse, a civic complex situated along the river’s edge. The Council functions as an environmental governance hub and public gathering space, facilitating dialogue, education, and strategic action around water management and river regeneration.

A speculative exploration of staged flooding scenarios in Rome, using modular interventions to test how water might be reintroduced into the urban fabric as a strategy for adaptation and renewal.

Plug-In Flooding

A speculative exploration of staged flooding scenarios in Rome, using modular interventions to test how water might be reintroduced into the urban fabric as a strategy for adaptation and renewal.

Constructing Dialogue Between River and City

Constructing Dialogue Between River and City

The Forum provides a space where natural systems and civic structures converge, shaping a new urban dialogue with the Tiber River.

Reactivating the embankment as a threshold between water and city, transforming a defensive wall into a site of connection.

Reclaiming the Riverfront

Reactivating the embankment as a threshold between water and city, transforming a defensive wall into a site of connection.

Through carefully shaped surfaces and directed flows, water becomes both an agent and an experience, inviting visitors to experience the building as a dynamic, living landscape.

Choreographed Water Flows

Through carefully shaped surfaces and directed flows, water becomes both an agent and an experience, inviting visitors to experience the building as a dynamic, living landscape.

The building’s pipework is intentionally exposed and celebrated as an architectural element, transforming a typically hidden infrastructure into a visual narrative of the water journey through the site.

Exposed Infrastructures

The building’s pipework is intentionally exposed and celebrated as an architectural element, transforming a typically hidden infrastructure into a visual narrative of the water journey through the site.

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The Bartlett
Summer Show 2025
26 June – 13 July
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