Suicidal Tendencies of Urban Architecture

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The urban expansion of Split depends heavily on a site tangenting the peninsula, an important future intersection of coastal traffic axes, that still stands as a precarious mountain of waste. Theatron addresses this precarity. Its precedent is the Piazza dell'Anfiteatro in Lucca. It is a public square in the shape of a Roman amphitheatre that once existed. It is no urban hommage but a morphologic proof of the city's development. Upon the city's expansion, the perimeter walls of the amphitheatre served as the main structure of new homes, the amphitheatre eventually dissolved and remained only as a memory inscribed into the urban morphology of Lucca.

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Theatron represents an insane solution of the waste depot site, standing as the center of a future conurbation outside the existing urban fabric; a new topological identity, a radical gesture of future urban development. It loops the traffic routes of neighboring cities within itself like a terminal. It gathers a mountain of waste into a bowl and converts it into energy to power the city's cultural center. Any mistake in the treatment of methane leads to a detonation. As with the amphitheater in Lucca, perhaps nothing will remain but the geometric logic of the Theatron inscribed in the new urban memory.

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