Centro Part 1 Project 2005 Richard Penman Leeds Beckett University | UK The building ‘Centro’ is to promote the digital arts, cinema and commerce. The site, in Rome, had to reflect its surroundings both culturally and contextually. My approach to the project was to focus on creating a community for people with a shared interest in ‘art’. The building had to be open and accessible to all the people of Rome, both local and foreign. The landscape was to be left open and usable, not just for café life but also as a place in which children could learn and interact with their surroundings. Richard Penman’s intelligent design for a Media Centre in Rome demonstrates originality in details such as the design of the multi-purpose hall in which seats fold out of the floor to convert the hall into a cinema. (The implications for the screen and projection room were rigorously followed through.) The scheme slots thoughtfully into the urban grid, ingeniously concealing difficulties such as the buttresses supporting an existing building. The scheme proposes a well organised sequence of external and internal spaces, including a new piazza with a nocturnal garden of lights. Digital Media were well used in the project’s presentation.