ReShape X: Civic Space after Nature

About The Entry

Our project imagines an architecture held together not by a singular form, but by a family of enduring stone figures. Acting as fragments, joints, and spatial anchors, these figures organize assembly while allowing the building to remain unfinished, adaptable, and open to future transformation. As the architecture is altered, repaired, or rebuilt, the stones remain as carriers of memory, holding traces of the past while preparing the ground for new forms of use.

The proposal begins with the historical practice of material reuse. In the Roman Forum, scattered capitals and marble fragments survive as remnants of former structures, later absorbed into new constructions. Stone is therefore understood not simply as matter, but as evidence: a record of previous lives and a medium through which architecture extends memory rather than freezes it.

On a former arsenal factory site south of Bologna’s historic center, the project works with existing brick walls, steel frames, terracotta roofs, and residual industrial spaces as a found material field. Quarry stone figures are introduced as permanent yet reconfigurable elements, designed to meet brick, timber, steel, planting, and ground. They can become walls, rooms, seats, landscape edges, or markers along a path.

Accepting weathering, rearrangement, and ecological growth, the project proposes a civic framework for reuse: an architecture of continuity, incompletion, and time-based transformation. In this way, the building is never resolved into a fixed object; it remains a living assembly, held together by stone figures that remember, adapt, and wait for what comes next.

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