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In the heart of Rome’s Jewish Ghetto, inside an ancient 14th-century convent, the project restores life and spatial unity to what was once the original refectory. Not a reconstruction, not a mimesis: a precise and respectful dialogue between the stratified memory of the place and a contemporary architectural system capable of inhabiting it without overpowering it.
The result is a 150-square-meter loft in which every choice-structural, material, distributive-comes from listening to a historically evocative space.
Key data
Figures
Status
Demolishing to Restore
The first gesture of the project is a subtraction: the demolition of superfetations accumulated over time, to restore the 14th-century shell to its original spatial unity. An act of respect even before that of design, giving back breath to proportions and geometries of extraordinary quality.
Contemporary system in the ancient
Lightweight steel structures, transparent surfaces, material wall partitions traverse the large empty space without competing with the existing envelope. The technological system does not hide: it dialogues. It stabilizes the compromised system of wooden beams, amplifies the interior spatiality through reflections and multiplications of perspectives, builds a temporal layering that is itself the theme of the project.
The technology band and the fluidity of spaces
Matter as dialogue
The service rooms are aligned in a longitudinal strip that runs through the loft, leaving the rest of the space free. The living spaces open up in a fluid and continuous succession-loft typology in its purest essence-in which the boundary between functions is suggested, never imposed.
The choice of materials is the most sensitive point of the project: the cold precision of steel, glass and pietra serena is contrasted with the warmth of antique surfaces, revitalized with fine plasterwork. Not contrast, but conversation between eras – where each material tells its own belonging to time without denying it.
