March 9-11th
The three days prior to our spring break was a workshop with a university in Rome called Roma TRE. We were divided into groups of four, two Iowa State Students and two Italian students from Roma TRE. The first day we were introduced to the project which consisted of integrating a window, door, and stair into the Aurelian Wall which is a wall that was originally built for defensive purposes in the 1st and 2nd century A.D., but in contemporary times creates a barrier for traffic and pedestrians. The goal of the project was to design a window, door and stair that facilitates the movement of pedestrian traffic across and through the wall. It was sometimes a challenge to communicate with ideas with the Italian students, but that just meant we had to get creative and use different words or even draw out ideas since that is the only true universal language.
Apart from the obvious goal of the project which was to produce a project we made friends and connections with the students we worked with who we will hopefully see a couple more times before the end of our time in Rome.