Hybrid Topologies is a term used to describe a series of design strategies that aim to identify dynamism and locate fissures in organizations, hierarchies and networks that are typically and categorically stabilized through habit, ritual and code. The studio proposes to explore and invent geometric and programmatic organizations for a structure that sustains the capacity to accommodate oscillations in occupancy and duration of use. The area of investigation will be selected sites within Central Rome, an Italian city that can uniquely be characterized through the analogy of a palimpsest, preserving traces and markings of the past yet inextricably functioning and reacting to contemporary metropolitan issues. The intent of this project is to utilize all the data collected from various investigations including but not limited to urban scanning of the city of Rome, potential dynamic conditions, site-specific research and documentation and analyses, abstract machine/diagram processes, analogical relationships and focus them towards developing project for temporary housing in Rome. “Temporary housing” includes scenarios of temporal variation in occupancy, defined by the methods and materials used in the construction of an inhabitable architecture, the limits set on the duration within which it is occupied, the specified events/ occupation to occur within the architecture, structural mobility and the cultural, socio-economic and political effects the architecture might proliferate.

This definition must respond to the specific sites chosen in Rome and the current and potential dynamics of the urban condition. The architecture must recognize and inevitably become a participant in the existing and continually evolving ecology of the sites chosen and their relationship to the entire city of Rome. The urban scanning and site analysis provides the actual and tangible information needed to understand the site/sighting of the proposals i.e. dimensions demographics, topography, solar orientation, etc. The abstract machine is used as a catalyst to understand the dynamic performances and potentials of ideas one might draw from the site within the design process and imagining the temporal potentials of inserting a performative architecture in the existing site conditions. Most importantly, it becomes an information-laden manifestation of imaginary forces and intuitive ideologies regarding the projects relationship to the site and additional facets to the projects distinction and characteristics. The site research, site selections, and site analyses engaged as a parallel study to the development of the abstract (diagrammatic) machine created an opportunity to gain a substantial understanding of the site and its contextual relationships while simultaneously developing and implementing design strategies.The distinction between these parallel studies in imperative to understand; the former, a study of existing and tangible elements that make up an ecology within which one might insert an architecture that must (1) understand (2) participate/transform (3) adapt to a site condition. The latter provides an opportunity to relinquish an otherwise prescribed variably limited and uncontrollably deterministic response in exchange for a multiplicity of possibilities for new typological approaches within the site.