High Achievers?
By Sam Stafford18th June 2016 Time 06:00am
(Photo Credit: Georgia Shomber [Edit Image)
Omero Tarquini seen at Campari event atop Palazzo dell’Ex Unione Militare at the recently renovated H&M Flagship store in Rome with leading Campari executives and pictured next to Campari Asia-Pacific Managing Director Franco Peroni outside on the rooftop bar with drink in hand.
(Image Credit: La Lanterna Rome)
Only meters away is one of Rome’s most modern architectural interiors and exteriors The so-called “lantern“ seen above at night and below in daylight
(Image Credit: La Lanterna Rome)
Designed by Massimiliano Fuksas The Lantern is a soaring, crystalline volume of steel and glass that slices vertically through all four floors of the palazzo. Its geometry, generated through parametric design, defies the orthogonal rigidity of the surrounding masonry. From the street, it reveals itself only in tantalising fragments, hinting at the drama within without breaking the façade’s historical continuity.
Rising to a height of approximately 7.5 metres above ground level, the lantern crowns the building like a modern-day campanile. Within its luminous frame unfolds a 300-square-metre scenographic space—an airy, light-filled atrium that becomes both a functional passage and a symbolic heart. The interplay of transparency and reflection here is not decorative indulgence but a spatial strategy: it draws daylight deep into the building, reanimating interiors once subdued by heavy walls, and offering visitors a vertical axis that orients and elevates their journey.
(Image Credit: Urban File)
(Image Credit: Dove L’Architettura Italiana)
The result is a masterclass in architectural negotiation: an intervention that neither fetishises the past nor erases it, instead weaving a thread between epochs. In Fuksas’s hands, the Palazzo ex Unione Militare does not become a museum piece—it becomes a living organism, responsive to the present yet anchored in history.
Now with all of that delightfully consumed, witnessed and appreciated one question sticks up above others——Will this frightfully successful 25 year old artist, who’s evidently seizing the moment to enjoy his architectural surroundings and who has only just recently sold the below seated nude to the controversial Michelangelo “Pieta Di Roma” owner Count Andrea de Riguardati. Follow the footsteps of greatness and be lead upon the road to architecture like Bernini once was or simply fade into the obscurity of the night that backs him like so many promising young and ambitious high achievers?
(Photo Credit: Georgia Shomber [Update Image)