Roasts amongst Ruins

HM of Unfinished Colosseum

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Unfinished Colosseum

[11723]

Roasts amongst Ruins: Towards a localised Italian coffee culture

Team

Name: Augustine Wong

Instagram: @auggyfilm

Nationality: Hong Kong/Canadian

Institution / Company: University of Toronto

Name: Emily Sun

Instagram: @bobaqueein

Nationality: Canadian

Institution / Company: University of Toronto

Name: Minh Hoang

Instagram: @ca.mi.lla_h

Nationality: Canadian

Institution / Company: University of Toronto

THE YEAR IS 2074.The world’s coffee capitals burn from climate change: the beloved beans are reduced to all but none. Exceedingly rare harvests are inevitably associated with the spilling of blood.

THE ROMAN CLIMATE HAS warmed up, and a rising sea level increases the local humidity, transforming the city’s cool winters and warm summers into a sweltering tropical paradise, where heavy rainfall events that were expected every fifty years, are now expected annually. 

THE CLIMATE HAS FAILED — but the party goes on. Social gatherings revolve around espressos, which the average Italian consumes four times daily. Amidst a global coffee shortage, coffee growing conditions in the Italian heartland become right. Coffee becomes the collective culture that draws Italians together in a crisis.

RECALLING THE COLOSSEUM’S post-Roman vernacular working-class history, from vegetable gardens to proposed wool factory, the facade becomes the site for an institution dedicated to cultivating and preserving coffee culture. A modular scaffold provides a framework for intervention, not only with modules dedicated to growing and processing coffee for consumption in cafes, but also towards long-term study hosting international coffee strains in cutting-edge laboratories, to form a knowledge hub to advancing coffee’s resistance against blight and climate change.

Jury Comments

– One of the best parasitic intervention on the Colosseum. Very well presented, strong storytelling theme | FMO