Image from http://www.studioworksarchitects.com/projects/projects.htmMary-Ann Ray
Mary-Ann Ray's Hospital and Archaeological Repositry for Tiber Island interestingly deals with the contemporary and historical Rome. The project makes a clear distinction between the surface, and the volume 'below'. The surface deck as a text for the future, and the beneath as a reference to the historical, manifesting as an archaeological repository. The island becomes an ark, with the repository orientated across the 'boat' like structural ribs "recalling and 'building in' the memory of the ancient island that took the form of a ship of stone".
In this project, the River Tiber orientates the building towards the flow of water, and as a bridge between one side of the river and the other. It places the static typology beneath the surface, like a depositing in the soil or reburial of retrieved objects. The exposed hospital mirrors the transient surface conditions between land and water, and either sides of the river. Healing patients are the traces of an enabling architecture, one that accomodates individual experiences and treatments that arbitrarily occur as patients enter the building.
