The city projects itself as an extrusion from the GRA (the Great Ring Road), overlapping and antagonizing the existing radial line typical of the city of Rome: the rotational, perpetual and endless movement of the ring city erases, contrasts and breaks the linear movement developed from the centre of Rome.

This is an utopia with a very precise physical projection: being the result of an existing trace, the ring city can only be linked to a specific place, in this case the city of Rome. Its references can be found in the studies on the utopian cities of the Sixties and on macro-structures, for example Superstudio’s Continuous Monument or Reflected Architecture, although, unlike the researches led in past years, it acquires the role of a significant element – it acquires, that is, an evocative role and a character of specificity of the place that Superstudio’s designs, for instance, lacked.

Although the GRA is perceived as a limit, today it isn’t such any more because the city of Rome has grown beyond its boundary. In this project, however, the limit acquires new values and meanings: we see a huge ribbon-building inside which the ring citizen is literally “imprisoned” and where the concentration of a range of functions neutralizes the fragmentation of the contemporary city. The Ring City includes a model of society that is alienated and at the same time fascinated by on-line communication and, in this case too, represents a society and a lifestyle that may be implemented in the near future. That is clearly exemplified by long distance communication: house-leisure-work, the very distance that today is eliminated, or rather concentrated within the four domestic walls; this allows to recognize and define a new idea of city as a place exclusively relying on vehicular communication in case of long distances and on network communication (the web) for everything else. There is no need to move physically any longer, to walk through space, there will be to walk at all. In the ring society food provision is ensured by the creation of multi-level mega-stores where consumers place orders from their computers in order to acquire whatever is necessary for daily life.

The risk of obsession is neutralised by light penetrating from above, double- and triple-height spaces and the presence of green areas, the element that ensures a spatially continuous character defining, at a certain level, a public place that is only accessible to tourists. The ring city is, in fact, the City of the Tourist who becomes, in effect, the only individual who can cross it physically and use it as a vehicle for the perception of historical and urban space. The green strip that can be used for camping, as well as the two hotel complex, both placed at the top levels, are exclusively available to temporary users of the city. In recent years Rome has become a museum-city, a giant theme park just like Venice and Florence. The functions, activities and lifestyle of the ring city’s residents are, instead, completely different. In fact, this solution relies on a superposition of layers at the top of which there is an opening that represents the ancient walkways of the walled cities. This is the only way to make light penetrate into he city and the only element used as public green area (a linear park).

This solution includes no functions that evoke the idea of gathering, of community. The ring city has no junctions or squares, just circulation functions. The junctions that are there are exclusively functions of the transportation network and then, as mentioned before, there is the web.

It is an independent structure that overlaps the existing one. It is a one hundred meters high and forty meters wide wall that separates past and future, urbanscape and landscape, void and full. The ring man cannot perceive this passage, he cannot be aware of the space and time conditions that bring life to the existing condition, he remains trapped into the city. The mirror skin of the ring city is used to neutralise matter – its reflection has the power to underline both the city’s history (the past) and the landscape (the future).

The space-time relationship of the ring city evokes the concept of infinity: an endless time that marks an endless movement and a repetitive space. A ring movement has neither beginning nor an end, it has no variants.