The site for this project is within the foundations of Hadrian's temple in the oldest part of Rome, several blocks from the Pantheon. While the program for this project was open-ended (a musuem of the city of Rome), my take on it was much more specific: the history of the city would be charted through the history of the papacy.
The museum is a continuous linear path from St. Peter to the present day. Each pope has an identically sized cube that is filled with momentos from his reign. When the lineage of the Papacy is unclear (and there are numerous times this has happened) the anti-pope's cube competes spatially with the "official" pope's display, forcing the visitor to adjust to a disruption in the path.
When the tower is tall enough to clear the surrounding buildings, I designed in a "positive Vatican-tropism" that leads the museum over the rooftops of Rome back to St. Peter's cathedral. The building grows incrementally each time a pope dies, so the Papacy will eventually reconnect with its origins.
