The rediscovered space between arts and architecture in the restoration of the former Teachers’ Club at the Città Universitaria of Rome

Rediscover the lost spaces of the former Teachers’ Club, - the Dopolavoro Universitario of the Sapienza- is the topic of a design path that gives the roman university community back to the memory of an important formal structure, unique in its typological dimension. The architectural framework is well known: the Città Universitaria of Rome, one of the most important Modernist Architecture in Italy, which master plan and main buildings were conceived by Marcello Piacentini, who led a team of the best Italian architects of the Thirties: Pagano, Ponti, Michelucci, Capponi, Minnucci, Muratori and others that collaborated in the design of the individual buildings. Among these the Teachers’ Club by Minnucci was built on the foundation structures of an unfinished clinic of the Hospital: the new structure preserve its original layout marked by the apse, but it consists of new volumes and cantilevered floors as Minnucci’s own exploration of modernist form. That’s the outstanding example of ancient reuse of existing artifacts that always happens in continuation with the past, even as it invokes the spirit of its own time, in which methods and techniques are employed that belong to the original form of the architectural structures. The Teachers’ Club hosted a lot of recreational areas and inside the apse there was the Salone delle Feste, a large double-height space decorated with a fresco by Giulio Rosso to witness the strength of the iconographic grafts in a close dialogue between arts and architecture. The paper is about of the events that have transformed the former University Teachers’ Club since its original structure to its fall into ruins, until today with our architectural design projects of refurbishment, which aim is the restore the original shape, that involves above all the interior spaces of the building, leaving the architecture facades itself relatively untouched.