Radisson Blu ES. Hotel | King Roselli Architetti

Hotel, conference centre, multi-storey car-park, Rome. Completed in 2002, 235 Guest rooms, Area: 12,800 m2 Hotel, Area: 19,000 m2 Car Park. Budget: €50m. Client: C.R.Invest.

New building in the centre of Rome- comprising the design of all aspects of the building and its immediate surroundings, including interiors. Hotel, conference centre, multi-storey car-park 600 cars in the Esquilino district of Rome (near Termini railway station).Design, planning permissions, detail design, working drawings and tender documents. Design of guest rooms, public spaces, interior and exterior design including furniture, lighting, fittings and signage.

The project for the hotel forms part of a larger urban plan drawn up by Rome City Council comprising the rest of the block and the surrounding blocks with the ambition of raising the area to a level in keeping with its very central position in the city. Briefly, it consisted of moving an open market from the perimeter of a 19th century piazza into two former barracks (one of which lies directly opposite the hotel), reactivating a theatre that had fallen into disuse for many years and generally restoring the area to its 19th century glory.

At first we were asked to work up what was a very basic design of a hotel over a carpark into a project with more emphasis on the hotel and less on the carpark. As the site was cleared to start work on the foundations of this revised design, an area of Ancient Roman remains over half the site was uncovered just thirty centimetres under the surface. This brought the construction to an abrupt halt while the archeologists began excavations, and gave us the chance to propose a completely new design which obviated the need for so much parking at an underground level.

A requirement made by the urban landscape commission was to make the two completely different activities, namely a multi-storey car park and a hotel, into a unified block, the whole of which is suspended from the ground to allow access to the ruins.