Live at Pompeii

Live at Pompeii emerged from a series of teaching and research programs at the Politecnico of Milan focused, over recent years, on the ancient cities of Pompeii, Paestum, and Herculaneum. Through the tools of architectural design, these programs have explored the relationship between ruins and the contemporary city. In the case of Pompeii, this question takes on particular relevance: not only because the ancient city is among the world’s most complex and visited archaeological sites, but above all because its perimeter now coincides with an unstable threshold, where the boundary between archaeological space and inhabited territory becomes porous and continually negotiable.

Buried in 79 CE and gradually brought back to light over the course of the last three centuries, Pompeii now inhabits a new form of existence. Every day, tens of thousands of people move through it, activate it, redefine its rhythms, returning the ancient city to a condition which, though radically different from its original one, restores it to a fully contemporary form of life.

The notion of the threshold constitutes the primary field of inquiry for Live at Pompeii (Academic Year 2025-26). The research developed by students at the Politecnico begins from a fundamental observation: Pompeii is not a body detached from its surroundings, but an organism that continues to depend materially on the territory around it. Roads, railways, services, water and electrical networks – everything that sustains the life of the Archaeological Park unfolds beyond its boundaries, within the dense urban and territorial fabric of the Vesuvian area. At the same time, however, the presence of the ancient city exerts such a powerful attraction upon the present that it profoundly shapes the imagination, economy, and transformations of the surrounding environment. Within this reciprocal tension, the distinction between inside and outside reveals itself as largely artificial and conventional: the two systems continually implicate and redefine one another.

From this tension emerges a central question: is it possible to (re)think the boundary between the ancient and the contemporary city as an active field of relations? From this perspective, the spatial limits of the Archaeological Park are understood not merely as administrative borders or physical interruptions, but rather as zones of contact and exchange, where the different lives and temporalities inhabiting Pompeii may overlap and coexist. The boundary thus becomes an operative site: a field in which to negotiate the coexistence of conservation and use, accessibility and protection, permanence and transformation.

The fourteen projects developed by students at the Politecnico, and gathered here together, engage with fourteen distinct sections of Pompeii’s perimeter, conceived as opportunities to formulate different hypotheses in terms of scale, function, and degree of speculation. Some proposals are openly speculative, extending toward almost utopian scenarios. Others address issues already embedded in the daily life of the Park: hospitality, mobility, infrastructural margins, service devices, the relationship with the landscape, and the possibility of redefining spaces for work and retreat capable of reflecting the complexity of a cultural and productive ecosystem.

In each of the fourteen projects, design does not intervene upon Pompeii as though it were an inert object, but rather as a living and stratified context, traversed by heterogeneous functions and non-coincident temporalities. In this sense, the projects adopt as a preliminary hypothesis the idea that interventions along the perimeter may correspond to a transformation of the ancient city as a whole: an environment which, in confronting the demands of the present, seems once again to question its own possibilities for use, relation, and openness.

Within this perspective, archaeological ruins are not simply what remains of a lost city. Rather, they operate as a cognitive device through which to measure the distance between what has been, what is, and what might still exist. Their presence invites engagement with a material condition that continues to pose questions. Starting from this premise, each project interprets, selects, and establishes relationships, assuming the responsibility of transforming without erasing. Archaeology, in this sense, constitutes an exceptional context precisely because it makes visible a condition that ultimately belongs to every human settlement: that of existing in a constant state of provisional balance between inherited pasts and projected futures.

The reference to Live at Pompeii, Pink Floyd’s 1972 performance within the city’s Amphitheatre, functions in this regard as an explicit statement of intent. It is not simply a tribute to an episode that has become embedded in the site’s collective imagination, but rather an invocation of a gesture that, through a different language, sought to dismantle any contemplative distance, establishing contact with the past through an active and situated action capable of inhabiting a place.

With the conviction that Pompeii, today more than ever, can be understood as a space of contact in which new forms of proximity may be constructed, the work developed at the Politecnico does not propose definitive answers, but rather a series of tools for an inquiry that remains open: models, plans, visual devices. Through these materials, Live at Pompeii invites us to consider the boundaries of the Archaeological Park as an active field of possibilities: a threshold still capable of being questioned.

Paolo Carpi, Andrea Tartaglia, con Filippo Bernardini, Davide Cerati, Silvio Lussana (Politecnico di Milano) – Giorgio Motisi (Parco Archeologico di Pompei)

Group 1
Amphitheatre Entrance

The project for the new Amphitheatre entrance imagines a radically alternative threshold to the existing one. The route also unfolds through the necropolis of Porta Nocera, where a new exhibition space is conceived to house a selection of casts of Pompeii’s victims. More than a simple access device, the project conceives the entrance as an experience of gradual passage: a sequence capable of transforming entry into the site into a moment of awareness, establishing a more complex and reflective relationship with the ancient city.

Coskun Hatice Irem, Aybek Ecemnur, Ocguder Deniz Emir

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Group 2
Cemetery

The Cemetery project proposes a response that is at once poetic and cynical to the possibility of extending the dialogue with Pompeii beyond the present. Two walls of burial niches rise within the agricultural landscape, abstractly evoking the presence of the ancient city walls. The project stages a continuity between distant epochs and the present: a space in which death becomes a radical element of equality, bringing together destinies separated by centuries within a shared geography of memory.

Longo Enrico, Pagliarulo Lorenza, Nalamati Nachiket Nagabhushanam

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Group 3
Memorial

A sequence of underground spaces carved near the Villa of Cicero offers an opportunity to engage with the memory of the eruption of 79 CE. The Memorial takes shape as a visual and spatial machine that restores centrality to the presence of Vesuvius: both a constant landscape element and the historical force that determined Pompeii’s fate. Through light, compression, and movement, the project seeks to create an immersive experience of suspension and reflection.

Ravasio Sara, Viganò Marta, Souti Vasiliki

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Group 4
Wine House

A linear path begins within the urban fabric of contemporary Pompeii and unfolds through a sequence of spaces dedicated to the ageing, bottling, tasting, and sale of wine produced in the Pompeian territory. After crossing a garden and a long tunnel, the route finally emerges near Porta Nola. The project intertwines productive and ritual dimensions, evoking the role wine occupied within the social and symbolic life of the ancient world, while restoring, through architecture, a possible continuity between contemporary practices and memory.

Nagel Ido Menahem, Huang Jiadi, Huang Jiarong

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Group 5
Lab Park

A building leaning against the city walls, not far from Porta Stabia, houses facilities for the Park’s staff – including offices, storage spaces, and laboratories – while also serving as the entrance to a new green area open to the contemporary city, located within a portion of the site that remains unexcavated. The project reflects on the possibility of rendering accessible what today appears as a margin, transforming a zone of separation into a shared space of use and exchange between research, maintenance, and public life.

Chen Lubing, Kerridge Luke, De Leon Reyes Damaris Melisa

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Group 6
Wine Factory

A winery, conceived as an explicitly productive building, establishes through a system of essential alignments a relationship between landscape, cultivated land, and archaeological site. The project engages with a practice that was central to the economy of ancient Pompeii and that still belongs to the life of the Park today, where wine production activities are carried out in collaboration with local partners. The winery thus becomes not only a productive infrastructure, but also a device capable of making visible the continuity between cultivation, landscape, and historical memory.

Reit Ana-Olivia, Bemani Roza, Julian Maurice Kusters

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Group 7
Residences for Scholars and Archaeologists

An unfinished building, located at the boundary between contemporary Pompeii and unexcavated areas of the ancient city, is reimagined as the starting point for a guesthouse for archaeologists and scholars. Alongside spaces dedicated to work and research, a large terrace and a series of common areas are conceived as public and collective spaces. The project reflects on temporary inhabitation as a form of stewardship and active engagement with the territory.

Raimondi Margherita, Xiao Xueqi, Liudvinavicius Tadas

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Group 8
Porta Ercolano

A long and slender portico re-establishes continuity between the area of Porta Ercolano and the Vesuvian landscape, while also offering itself as a new potential entrance to the Archaeological Park. Rather than marking a limit, the project constructs an inhabitable threshold capable of bringing architecture and nature, city and countryside, into dialogue. The linear trajectory of the portico guides both gaze and movement, transforming access into an experience of gradual immersion within the Pompeian ecosystem.

Bastidas Meza Nicole Estefania, Cao Mai, Wan Jiahe

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Group 9
Artist Residencies + Pompeii Commitment Museum

Two sites positioned at the edges of the archaeological area, at opposite ends of the ancient axis connecting Porta Stabia and Porta Vesuvio, host a structure conceived as an artist residency and an imagined museum intended to house the Park’s contemporary art collections. Connecting them is a passage through the ancient city itself: a route that transforms walking into a relational practice, bringing creative work and archaeological space into dialogue. The project imagines Pompeii as a place to traverse and inhabit, where artistic production may directly engage with the site’s complexity.

Carvalho Mathias Gabriela, Ma Weiwei, Xue Yinong

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Group 10
Thermal Complex

Located near the Palestra Grande and the Amphitheatre, not far from the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin in the modern city, the project for a new Thermal Complex engages with one of the most significant architectural typologies of the Roman city. In ancient Pompeii, baths were not only places of hygiene but also fundamental spaces of sociability, encounter, and collective life. The project freely reinterprets this tradition, engaging with the architectural examples preserved within the site while proposing a new architecture capable of redefining the boundary between ancient and contemporary city through the idea of shared well-being.

Sandra Gopan, Carranza Hernandez Militza, Paul Rothschopf

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Group 11
Piazza Esedra (Great Square)

A monumental square structure attempts to respond to the challenges connected to visitor reception: a large-scale logistical centre concentrating entrances, orientation systems, and services. Deliberately radical in both scale and visual impact, the proposal foregrounds the complexity of managing the flows that move daily through Pompeii, transforming an infrastructural necessity into an opportunity for critical reflection on the relationship between urbanism and devices of hospitality and tourist management.

Degan Marcos, Deng Jiexuan, Carlo Albeggiani

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Group 12
Archaeological Park Offices

A triangular building designed for the Park’s offices, located near the theatre district, projects the sequence of forms belonging to the ancient structures – the semicircular theatre and the adjacent rectangular quadriporticus – toward the articulated fabric of the contemporary territory, with the Lattari Mountains forming a panoramic backdrop. The project interprets the administrative building not as a mere functional container, but as a space of geometric and symbolic mediation.

Sun Yingyi, Rasouli Mina

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Group 13
Refreshment Area

Near Porta Ercolano, in dialogue with the ruins of ancient dwellings, two simple and identical volumes, slightly rotated to follow the non-orthogonal geometries of the Roman fabric, house a café and a restaurant. The project simultaneously operates as a mediating device between the urban landscape and the territory beyond, constructing a space in which pause becomes an opportunity for observation and encounter.

Hoda Rowan, Pascarella Margherita, Mohamed Ibrahim Abdalla

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Group 14
Laboratories and Storage Facilities

Within the embankment just outside the northern walls of the ancient city, a building partially embedded in the ground accommodates restoration laboratories and storage spaces currently dispersed throughout the site. The project addresses an issue often invisible to the public yet crucial for the Park: the constant need for efficient infrastructures without excessively burdening the spaces of the ancient city and, at the same time, without distancing them from it. By concentrating these services within an accessible structure integrated into the landscape, the proposal reflects an attempt to reconcile the demands of preservation with those of research and investigation.

Bianchi Matteo, Guerci Allegra, Cozzio Lea

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