Agendas of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva

Rome, Italy / Spring 2018 / European Honors Program / Independent Study / Strategic Programming, Institutional Critique, Adaptive Reuse

During my independent study as a student in RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome, I focused on being in situ with the city and its resources. As a culmination of all the site visits, lectures, and spaces I visited I began to record and process everything through a series of collections. As one of two architecture students in a cohort of artists, I learned to express architectural arguments in more explicitly visual and diagrammatic ways. 

Agendas of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva

In Rome, churches serve as signposts for the urban landscape, marking each palazzo and street. Included as public spaces in the Nolli plan, I wanted to understand how churches could be intervened to uphold Catholic values. As a projective exercise, I wanted to consider the relationship between word and deed in hegemony. As a way of knowing, this project tests constructs we accept as denizens of society, and serves as a reminder for everyone to address their own agency through these social and spatial constructs. I chose Santa Maria Sopra Minerva because it was constructed on a pagan temple, thus continuing the co-option of site.