Frascati Knowledge Hub

Frascati Knowledge Hub: Renewing Epistemic Culture through the Architecture of the Piazza — the Spring 2026 option studio of the University of Miami School of Architecture Rome Program — starts from a research question. What are the epistemic consequences of embedding an applied research organization inside the urban fabric of a settlement, rather than setting it apart from it?

Frascati has two inherited answers, and the work refuses both. One is the enclosed research campus, self-contained and set apart. The other is the retreated private villa, the tradition of withdrawal that has characterized thinking in these hills.

The work proposes a third way: an organization diffused through the ordinary buildings of the historic center, distributed rather than enclosed, embedded rather than withdrawn. It asks what that arrangement does to the knowledge such an organization can produce.

The syllabus sets the piazza as the instrument: “This studio will investigate how contemporary knowledge hubs can benefit from adopting Italian piazze as their organizing fulcrum.” The site is Piazza del Mercato, in Frascati's historic center, where students worked within the buildings and public spaces of an existing piazza and adapted them to accommodate a distributed institutional environment. The studio ran from 22 January 2026 to a final review on 5 March, with a day in Frascati on 26 January and a field trip to Siena on 5–7 February.

The studio continues the line opened by the case study Otium, Negotium, on two millennia of intellectual retreat in Frascati.