Silvia Piana — Milan (IT) — Architect
Silvia Piana — Milan (IT) — Architect

2025

Re-enchanting Villa Medici - Call For Projects

Académie de France à Rome

Competition Entry 

Re-writing the inner pavilions

 

Editing existing. The project for Villa Medici begins with a precise reading of the site, understood not as a set of constraints but as a layered assemblage of materials, traces, additions and repairs that already define a complex architectural landscape.
Our first step was to interpret this landscape carefully, identifying elements that remain functional, those that are fragile, those that lack quality, and those capable of generating identity.
The premise is straightforward: the space should continue to narrate its own history. Our intervention inserts a measured new chapter into the existing fabric, one that acknowledges and respects the building’s long stratification. We work to clarify and expand the spaces by acting only where necessary removing what is superfluous, reinstating what still performs, and introducing new elements through a discreet, legible and reversible language.






Traces as design material. “An inhabited space is a palimpsest: every gesture, every use, every modification leaves a trace that shapes the identity of a place.” (Marc Augé, Non-Lieux, 1992). Villa Medici is a layered palimpsest. Each past intervention has left its mark some strong, some fragile, some contradictory. Our task is to read these traces with precision: to preserve what reinforces spatial logic and to remove what obscures it or disrupts function. The project rejects nostalgia and avoids idealisation: not everything old deserves preservation, and not everything imperfect must be erased. By selecting, amplifying, and at times reinterpreting these traces, we reveal a renewed spatial order legible, coherent, and responsive to the evolving needs of its inhabitants.

 

Deliberate Interventions. The project unfolds through a series of deliberate interventions. None seek to radically rewrite the space; yet, when applied with precision, they shape the quality of living in profound ways. The design emerges through careful decisions, attentive observation, subtle corrections, and discoveries revealed in dialogue with the existing fabric. These interventions take many forms: lightening, preserving, restoring, declaring, distinguishing, consolidating, integrating, extending, connecting. Each action is small, considered, and capable of producing cumulative impact across the whole, reinforcing spatial clarity, coherence, and adaptability.

In collaboration with Alessandro Leone