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Making Public

Part 2 Project 2024
Callum Geddes Symmons
Mackintosh School of Architecture | UK
‘Making Public’ is an investigation into architectural transformation and the contemporary form of the public. The thesis takes as a testing ground Genova, Italy, a city with a rich history of contested public space.

The expansion of Genova’s port during the 20th century intensified a problematic co-dependency between the city and its industry, marginalising public space within the districts inhabited by the port’s workers. A close reading of these neighbourhoods reveals an opportunity in the form of a network of abandoned aristocratic villas, relics of the medieval Genovese republic. These private villas are appropriated and transformed, retroactively establishing a system of public spaces within an urbanism scarred by industrial infrastructure.

The thesis selects one such instance - the Villa Rossazza - as a prototype, transforming the villa and its garden through a surgical process of architectural otomy and prosthesis. This transformation is conceived as a catalyst, the first of several subsequent projects collectively forming a new typology: the villa publica.


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2024
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