Rocco
Rocco is the reading room designed by Fosbury Architecture for the workshop “An Archive of Resistance" held during the Milano Arch Week 2018 in the garden of la Triennale. Organized by IRA-C and Fosbury Architecture with Plasticity and in collaboration with Domus Magazine, "An Archive of Resistance" is an investigation on domesticity and its current disruptions. The participants were asked to process the archival material of Domus selected by the organizers in order to produce visions that can describe the contemporary learning from intuitions of the past. The reading room served as display for the articles, stage for conversation between organizers and participants, exhibiting space for the outcomes of the workshop and informal meeting place during the Arch Week.
Rocco was conceived as a folly in the park of la Triennale and located right aside the Mysterious Baths Fountain by Giorgio De Chirico. The reading room is built out of blocks of Dalmatiner sponsored by Caparol, originally produced as an insulation foam. The design relies on the ambiguous appearance of the material, in between granite and a Memphis pattern, in order to produce a small architecture that ironically hints to a frivolous sense of monumentality. The foam blocks are carved to produce a room surrounded by thick walls. While the interior is faceted to accommodate the images produced during the workshop, the exterior is chiseled to echo a column drum, rocchio in italian. Rocco is architecture at a median scale between furniture and space, epitomizing the research conducted by Fosbury Architecture on the Environments of Resistance for Social Individuals.
