City Rooms:
The Lion, the Leopard & the Genius of Palermo
The Lion, the Leopard & the Genius of Palermo
Louis Kahn once said: ‘Architecture comes from the making of a room’. City-Rooms explores three periods of Sicilian history through three figures. Through Carlo Scarpa (the Lion) and his iconic restoration of Palazzo Abatellis in 1954, Don Fabrizio (the Leopard) and his relationship between the aristocrats and the politicians in Palermo and the Genius of Palermo (a mythical figure and patron God of the city).
These three figures occupied a number of rooms, scattered through the city. Through a series of surveys, we drew these rooms and folded them into a new site, near the ancient home of the Sicilian Parliament in Palazzo dei Normanni.
© Murray Livingston, Eirini Makarouni & Katerina Saranti
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Louis Kahn once said: ‘Architecture comes from the making of a room’. City-Rooms explores three periods of Sicilian history through three figures. Through Carlo Scarpa (the Lion) and his iconic restoration of Palazzo Abatellis in 1954, Don Fabrizio (the Leopard) and his relationship between the aristocrats and the politicians in Palermo and the Genius of Palermo (a mythical figure and patron God of the city).
These three figures occupied a number of rooms, scattered through the city. Through a series of surveys, we drew these rooms and folded them into a new site, near the ancient home of the Sicilian Parliament in Palazzo dei Normanni.
© Murray Livingston, Eirini Makarouni & Katerina Saranti
This new ‘Palermo Court’ holds four functions: a theatre and library, an observatory, a textiles workshop and a train station, all previously found inside Palazzo dei Normanni. It unpacks a surveyed archaeology of the city, where rooms found across Palermo currently comprise these new collections of functions and spaces. The three figures are relocated, found once more inside Palermo Court.
