A New Starck-hotel in the Centre of Rome

In Rome, a new Brach hotel by Philippe Starck will open its doors in 2025. The building in iron, glass and vegetation dialogues with the pre-existing buildings and the urban fabric, providing new keys to modern architecture.

Going around Rome lately, it is all a buzz of construction sites and transformations. And not everything can be traced back to the long wave of what remains after the closure of Superbonus 110 and credits, with the race to the scaffolding and the last sheet of thermal insulation. Fortunately - to be exclaimed aloud! - there is an air of real novelty and, in at least a couple of cases, it is an absolute or at least rare novelty in the Italian and specifically Roman context.

Artribune gave a preview of the news on 12 January, publishing some unpublished renderings: a new hotel of the Brach chain, owned by the Evok group, will rise in Via Luisa di Savoia in the spring of 2025. The signature of the project is the multifaceted French architect and designer Philippe Starck, born in 1949, who is very active in the international panorama of innovation, experimentation and - as we know - provocation.

It is easier, I know, to associate Starck with the design scale of a chair or a complement. Perhaps this is because these objects are more easily associated, in the collective imagination, with the possibility of generating a surprise of simple and direct experimentation.

Kartell's Ghost, moulded in transparent or coloured polycarbonate and reproduced in a hundred or more attempts at copying in its playful forms poised between old and new, is something that is now part of what we file in our mental and emotional archive of modern design.

Yet there is also a Starck who designs buildings and interiors and does so with meticulous attention. This person is someone who, in the case of the new hotel to be built right in the centre of Rome, is also in line with the demands of client Evok, who bases its accommodation project on elegance and extreme customisation.

Let us explore the area of intervention. We stand in front of the Porta del Popolo (People's Gate), which is the gateway to the historic centre on the Aurelian Walls from the Flaminia consular road. Once through the Porta you are in Piazza del Popolo and you can choose which trident street to take. Those who have studied architecture at La Sapienza know these places perfectly, having explored them far and wide in the breaks between lectures.

On this side of the door we are in the Flaminio district, amidst Art Nouveau buildings and 1930s construction. In order to make room for Starck's new hotel, something incredible happened in Rome (and herein lies the absolute novelty to which I referred at the beginning): an old school building - the Istituto Tecnico Commerciale Maffeo Pantaleoni - was completely demolished, leaving a unique and very precious portion of urban land available for interpretation by modern architecture.

Starck's Brach will have on its left the rich and elegant Baroque façade of Villa Ravà delle Rose, designed by Cesare Bazzani and built between 1906 and 1911, now home to the Ambassador of the Republic of Colombia. On the right, it dialogues with the volume of the Banca Popolare di Milano office building, Luigi Moretti's last work in Rome, created by four hands with Carlo Zacutti. Behind it, four steps away along the Lungotevere, one arrives at the Palazzina Nebbiosi, built between 1928 and 1932 for Pier Luigi Nervi's construction company to a design by architect Giuseppe Nebbiosi.

The confrontation with the pre-existence places Starck in the difficult position of interpretation and integration. In the context of the city centre, it could not have been otherwise. The intervention, which announces itself in iron, glass and green on the façade and roof, seems to have been scaled down and recalibrated according to the actual possibilities of realisation with respect to the original project, or so the rumours say.

The construction site is in full swing, also under the guidance of Surf Engineering, the Roman partner of the Starck studio. The inauguration is expected in time for the Jubilee of 2025.