OCHAP

Office for Cohabitation Processes

MUSEO DELLA SCIENZA DI ROMA

PROGRAM: Library
PROJECT: OCHAP (Valerio Franzone - Lead Architect), I. M. M. (Architect), Yuna Li (Designer)
CLIENT: Ministry of Spatial Planning, Urbanism and State Property
LOCATION: Podgorica, Montenegro
AREA: 10.411 m²
COST: € 14.116.042
STATUS: International design competition, 2025

In 1748, Giovan Battista Nolli drew the Nuova Topografia di Roma, a massive representation of Rome that highlighted, for the first time, the strong relationship between the city's space and its use, distinguishing between private and public realms. All the streets and squares were represented as voids, and all the buildings as solids. Still, Nolli represented some buildings as voids, recognizing their public use and value.
This project transforms this understanding of urban space into a design strategy: the Central University Library in Podgorica is conceived as a spatial and metaphorical representation of a city—a system of intertwined, interdependent solids and voids. This system is not just a spatial setting, but a social structure that regulates the private and public realms of this cultural building and its use. What appears to be a single building is a system of interdependent solids and voids that, starting at ground level, develops its structure as it rises, creating a porous public structure shaped by squares, alleys, and a system of natural spaces.
The building's spatial structure also serves as a means of connecting to the surrounding urban system, introducing tortuosity into the repetitiveness of the campus grid.
The façade system of the building is an attempt to reflect on the meaning of design composition: different window and door shapes communicate the various functions within the building and follow their distinct needs for light.

The materialisation of the library emerges directly from the geology and cultural traditions of Podgorica, turning excavation into construction and exposing architecture as infrastructure.
The excavation for the underground parking is not treated as waste but rather as a raw material: the soil is transformed into prefabricated rammed-earth blocks.
By employing raw, unpolished materials, the library is not a sealed object but an exposed environmental machine. Its earth walls breathe and filter, its stone plinth expresses geology and permanence, its timber trusses reveal structural logic. Nothing is hidden: the building makes visible the processes by which materials regulate climate, acoustics, and air. Architecture here becomes pedagogical infrastructure—rooted in local geology and ecologies, transparent in function, and open to collective experience.
The structure combines the robustness of reinforced concrete with the lightness of laminated timber trusses. Concrete cores and slabs provide seismic stability and fire resistance, while glulam trusses allow for open-plan halls.
The library is a transcalar environmental infrastructure in which architecture does not conceal its operations but exposes them as part of civic culture. Its ecological approach is based on four intertwined logics: energy, air, water, and biodiversity.