Hotel Romeo Roma / Zaha Hadid Architects

The classical interpretation of Rome as a palimpsest of architectural layers—Baroque buildings atop Renaissance and medieval structures, themselves atop their Roman predecessors—includes a final layer of verticality: ceilings of painted trompe l'oeil arches, heavenly vaults, and celestial chambers populated with ascendant saints, martyrs, and putti. From the very beginning of her career, Zaha Hadid sited her buildings in the air, floating buildings on shadow, light, and seams of space that lifted volumes above the ground, relating her work to another tradition—Rome's. Hadid, and the city's architects of the Renaissance and Baroque that preceded her, aspired to the air, the skies, and the heavens. In designing the hotel conversion of the Palazzo Capponi, on the Via di Ripetta, a branch of the city's Sistine Trident radiating from the Piazza del Popolo, Hadid and her team at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) led by Paola Cattarin, started where Baroque architects ended their palimpsest—at the vaulted ceilings.