Eleven buildings with a total of 23 paintings by Caravaggio on show, mark out a walking route through the historic centre of Rome. The approaching fourth centenary of Caravaggio's death in 1610 gives cause to complement these with a twelfth building, an information centre. The route's momentum is carried over to the building's design and the immediate surroundings. This memorial to Caravaggio proceeds from my fascination with contrasts between old and new, between tradition and renewal. Not to polarize, but to obtain nuance, connectivity and cohesion. In this building, the Italian painter Caravaggio and his work are the apotheosis of this opposition between old and new, past and present, and this is the principal theme of its architecture. Here Caravaggio's paintings, life and personality are translated into subtle architectural references, so that the building implicitly serves as a narrative medium.

By siting the building alongside Area Sacra dell'Argentina, an archaeological site, it engages with the ruins of the temples there. The one becomes the setting for the other and complementary aspects emerge in both cases. The setting is in keeping with Caravaggio's dramatic realism, one of the key themes in his work.

Two institutions devoted to this painter - the Caravaggio Foundation and the Roberto Longhi Foundation - are domiciled in the newly designed building, which also includes a study centre with an auditorium and refreshment facilities. A trail of Caravaggio information points winding among these functions gives visitors a sense of strolling through a Caravaggio painting.

The building is in principle a taut, smooth box - static in terms of specifications, sculptural as an urban mass, dynamic in its content and organization. Its outer skin marks the transition between the historically charged city and the new building.

Some of the floors have been accentuated to form a flowing continuous ribbon around the building. In the intertwinement of building, place and city, these floors are braced, as it were, to accept the building's various functions without these being immediately discernible to the outside world. The frontage between floors is transparent, which normally would relate the building directly to its surroundings. But this transparency is countered by the diffuse play of vertical slats in an outer layer that adds depth to the relationship between inside and outside. This introduces the metaphor of the drapery, one of the characteristic features in Caravaggio's paintings; the architectural skin that both conceals and reveals.

The picture is that of a building draped in a cloth whose folds reach forward and back again in their own game of light and shadow. By continuing the folds in the facade planes, the 'cloth' seems to have neither beginning nor end. This abstraction gives form to a modern concept of infinity and at the same time makes a unique exception of each fold.

Place of education: Tilburg Academy of Architecture and Urbanism
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Jeroen van Schooten, Martien Jansen, Jan Pesman, Marc Glaudemans