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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 Genova, Italy, as a testing ground: a city with a rich history of contested public space. The expansion of Genova’s port during the 20th century intensified a problematic codependency 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: 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.

Callum Geddes Symmons

Tutor(s)

2024
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