I attended a semester in Italy for my third year at a school located in the Tuscan hill town of Castiglione Fiorintino. My professor assigned our project in a city located 15 minutes from us called Cortona. We spent the first few weeks analyzing the built fabric of the city and learning the history of Italian urban planning. Teams of three were assigned a street to analyze together and to accumulate information for our design challenge. We were individually assigned to improve our streets with a series of interventions that would make the space more like an urban “room”.  The interventions were required to demonstrate qualities of the street, define movement along the street, provide places for seating, and are considered a single whole and not fragmented from the original street. Intervention of one façade was also required along with one water fountain. Another requirement was that all drawings were to be hand drawn on italian fabriano paper. 

It was the water fountain that gave me my inspiration. Water is a place that brings people together and I learned that in the past, water fountains used to be places of activity and social interactions. I wanted to celebrate water and thought of the cascading rings that surround the water droplet. I placed my fountain in-between two existing arches that used to serve another purpose. The street had a slight slope so I decided to take advantage of that and made wide steps that draw you down towards the waterfall. The radiating rings extended all the way to the other side where I made the intervention to the façade of a proposed café, which is at the highest point. The steps serve a dual purpose as ways for movement and seating. At any point, even in the café, the fountain can be visible.