A new Museum of the suburbs in Rome. Architecture for new narrative lexicons in the R5 sector of Tor Bella Monaca

On the eastern outskirts of Rome, the boundary between the urban area and the rural landscape is defined by the great redent of Tor Bella Monaca, designed by Pietro Barucci in 1980. Today, this huge modern monument stands as a witness to an ideology that has failed to unravel the tensions between urbs and polis, an emblem of a society that marginalises its edges in pursuit of an idea of perpetual centralisation. In this context, the Plan promoted by Roma Capitale aims to reinterpret Tor Bella Monaca as a material and cultural heritage to be valorised and transformed, favouring the construction of a new sense of urban community. The think tank coordinated by Orazio Carpenzano has developed a regeneration project to redeem the area physically and functionally, with a focus on the relations between the center and the periphery, as well as on typological and environmental aspects. The symbol of this desire for rebirth is the project of the RIF - Museo delle Periferie, a museum-lab that develops architecturally in the underground level and emerges into the north courtyard of the complex with three large patios, which rewrite a new sampling of possible uses in the intermediate space between the collective dimension of the city and the domestic dimension of the house. The project recognizes the periphery as the habitat for the birth of a new idea of civic culture: inclusive, collaborative, dialogic, and future-oriented, characterized by the vitalistic charge that defines borderline spaces.