Untouchables_PiazzaVenezia
Derek Pirozzi Design Workshop + William Olmsted Antozzi Office of Architecture
| The road to social justice is long and winding |
Civilization has long awarded its greatest contributors with immortality. Whether cast in bronze or chipped from stone, they represent the virtues of their time, embraced by society. However emulated, they bear an enduring flaw, an inability to lead further. Immobile, they become stale and ineffective. Society moves beyond them, inspired by new torchbearers moving towards the future.
Today, nations across the world now find the hardened remains of these immortals strewn across city streets and tossed to the water’s bottom. Symbols of our own suppression and demise, toppled in the rapturous wake of vengeance. Rejects from our wretched past, they are outcasts, unwanted and unworthy.
| Piazza Venezia |
Dominated by the endless movement of the city, Piazza Venezia is hard to enjoy for the people it invites. Traffic, rotating through the center like a children’s carousel, dismembers the parts from the whole, pushing visitors to an ever-thinning periphery. Flamboyant and bombastic, a bronze monument of Victor Emanuel II sits atop a white marble base, the Father of the Fatherland at its gravitational center. Elevated and of a godly scale, the statue dominates the sky of the piazza but does little to relate to the passer-by.
| The Surge |
Worldwide, disgraced sculptures from every society will be brought to Piazza Venezia. Used to rightly serve as the building blocks for a flourishing movement, the design acknowledges an ugly past which cannot be erased but can be used as the agent for change. A looping, never-ending path spirals throughout the piazza. Its foundation, built on the backs of these outcasts. Visitors glide above, physically and symbolically, segregated from the acts and atrocities of those below.
The path encircles the statue of Victor Emanuel II, slowly winding the visitor around him. The experience undoubtedly belittling, off-putting, and seemingly superficial, stands in contrast with a newly set statue at the opposite end. A protestor for social justice, one demanding progress and inspiring those around her. She is of a human scale, able to be engaged, admired, and understood. Visitors find themselves eye-to-eye, shoulder-to-shoulder, a reflection of themselves in which they see that even they can lead us forward.
