Project Overview
This is speculative urbanism at its most ambitious: a vision for a capitol city — not the renovation of an existing one, but the conception of a new one from first principles. The project asks what it would mean to design a seat of government and culture today with the same conviction, formal ambition, and civic seriousness that drove the great capital cities of history — Haussmann’s Paris, L’Enfant’s Washington, Lutyens’ New Delhi. It is a question that cuts to the heart of what we believe architecture can and should do in a democratic society.
Design Philosophy
The vision rejects the twin failures of contemporary civic design: the timid historicism that produces facsimiles of past grandeur, and the corporate modernism that produces civic buildings indistinguishable from office parks. Instead, it draws on both the formal traditions of the great capitol cities and the spatial innovations of contemporary urbanism to produce something genuinely new.
The central organizing device is the grand axis — a device as old as the avenue de l’Opéra and as contemporary as the Champs-Élysées re-imagined as a pedestrian boulevard. The axis is not merely ceremonial; it is the spine of a mixed-use city that integrates government, culture, commerce, and residence in a continuous urban fabric. The capitol building itself sits at one end of the axis, not as a terminus but as a hinge between the formal city and the natural landscape beyond.
Technical Specifications
Urban Structure: The city is organized on a modified Baroque grid, with a primary axis 60 m wide (carriageway, cycle paths, and planted median) flanked by secondary streets at 30 m width. City blocks are 120 m × 80 m, large enough for interior courtyards but small enough for pedestrian permeability.
Building Heights: A strict height control limits all buildings except designated civic monuments to 30 m (approximately 8 storeys). This creates a consistent urban cornice line across the city, broken only by the domes, spires, and towers of major public buildings, which can rise to 80–120 m.
Capitol Building: The central government building is a massive civic structure occupying an entire city block (120 m × 120 m) on a raised podium. Its architecture combines a stone base (granite and travertine), a mid-section of expressed concrete structure and glass, and a crown of oxidized copper that reads from across the city as a luminous green beacon. The building is entered through a colonnade of 20 m-high stone columns that encircles the podium on all four sides.
Public Realm: The design allocates 40% of the city’s surface area to public space: boulevards, parks, piazzas, and arcaded streets. No building is more than 100 m from a significant public open space.
Blueprint & Urban Plan Notes
The master plan drawing shows the primary axis running north–south for 3 km from the capitol to a great public park at the southern edge of the city. Along its length, six major civic buildings — the national library, the supreme court, the national theatre, the museum of history, the gallery of contemporary art, and the central market hall — are set on axis or flanking the boulevard in symmetrical pairs.
The residential quarters occupy the city blocks to the east and west of the civic axis, organized as perimeter blocks with active ground-floor uses and private or semi-public courtyards above. The street network within the residential quarters is deliberately irregular, creating a contrast between the formal civic spine and the more human-scaled grain of daily urban life.
SPANTONE 