‘Il Castello’ former factory restoration

Project

269886

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Submitted

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NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS AWARDS : existing completed examples

Project title

‘Il Castello’ former factory restoration

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Description

Born for the drying of tabacco and synthesis of a landscape intended for work, the ancient factory called ‘Il Castello’ is recovered for new uses, opening up to the Community as a court of collective knowledge, theater of public-private synergies aimed at regenerating the land over which it dominates. Respect for environmental values has led the intervention to develop almost exclusively inside the building, reconfigured in order to restore its semantic identity in the contemporary dimension.

Where was your project implemented in the EU?

When was your project implemented?

Has your project benefited from EU programmes or funds?

Which programme(s) or fund(s)? Provide the name of the programme(s)/fund(s), the strand/action line as relevant and the year.

Please provide a summary of your project

  The building object of the intervention constitutes the housing and production section of the historic court called “Il Castello”, located where the Alto Ferrarese area fades from the Modenese valleys, between provinces related by family, “frontier land” with precarious hydraulic balances. The project provides the recovery of the mighty barycentric building at the court, one hundred meters long and resolved in the expansive articulation of eight lateral modules joined by five aerial central arches. The restoration of the former factory has combined the aspects of strengthening and seismic improvement of the structures with those concerning the critical rereading of the material text, in order to restore the semantics of the construction schedule. The unitary character of the building suggested wearing the homeopath’s gloves, recovering it from the outside to its harmonic image and obtaining uses within it that are compatible and non intrusive. The structural solution refuses to show itself in order to silently harmonize with the architecture. Respect for environmental values, even the most prosaic, leads the project to develop almost exclusively within the volume, emptying it and reconfiguring it; outside, only a few calibrated “scalpel blows” are allowed, the one necessary to restore the history of the building. Inside the perimeter, on the order hand, double and triple height voids have been obtained, with multiple views, without however distorting the share of decks and ‘rediscovered’ windows. From the balcony-study obtained in the mezzanine, the free spaces are dominated within which the staircase climbs and the living room develops, from the respective decks, through the existing windows and the reopened arched ones, you have a “long view” of the infinite countryside. The partial emptying of the internal volumes allows the amplification of the spaces, in depth and in height, giving the sense of a confortable building.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of sustainability and how these have been met

How can design contribute to sustainability and how can the roots of an ancient building contribute to obtaining workspaces with the right ventilation and temperature, while mantaining a zero impact on the environment? The key to the sustainability recovery of the building was wrtitten in its historical identity and in its morphological-constructive nature.Born as a factory in the form of a passive machine, capable of capturing, distributing and regulating the air currents to ensure the temperature drying of tabacco and hemp, the factory was equipped with an intelligent and effective natural ventilation system that across the lateral sections according to their longitudinal development, favoring the right microclimate from products and workers.In its transformation from “machine à produire” to machine of collective knowledege, the building retains its matrix of passive system and makes it a primary resource to recover spaces for new uses, without altering its semantic message. The perimeter walls recovered with mortars based on natural raw materials, with their mass help to temper the work spaces without resorting to invasive thermoregulation systems. The caretaker’s house is lined with an internal layer of rock wool and is equipped with a high energy underfloor heating system activated by a heat pump that excludes the use of fossil coal.In addition to the energy self-sufficiency of the building, the food self-sufficiency of those who work and live there is also guaranteed, who will consume fruit and vegetables produced at zero km in the neighboring gardens.The renunciation of chemical synthesis materials and sophisticated thermoregulation technologies and the use, instead, of natural materials and systems discreetly integrated into the architecture of the spaces are the formula for restoring an eco-sustainable building using the tools of the archaic primitive common sense. So in the right design, sustainability in nothing more than the rigorous use of common sense.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience beyond functionality and how these have been met

The enhancement project of the former factory combined the aspects of the recovery of the structures with those concerning the critical re-reading of the material text, in order to restore the semantics of the constructive schedule. The unitary character of the building suggested putting on the homeopath’s gloves, recovering from the outside to its harmonic image and obtaining internal uses that are capable and not intrusive. The structural solution refuses to exhibit in order to harmonize with the architecture, recovering an envelope within which to create new homes and work spaces. Recovering a building compromised by a natural disaster certainly means redefining its structures, but also reiventing the sense of living in it, creating spases included between existing walls, whose history suggests keeping. The right respect for environmental values, even the most prosaic, leads the project to develop almost exclusively within the volume, emptying it and reconfiguring it; outside, only a few calibrated “scalpel blows” are allowed, the one necessary to restore the history of the building. The decisive key of the project lies in the need to reduce spaces and surfaces that are initially scarcely used; this made it possible to obtain internal voids with double or triple height, with multiple views over the infinite countryside. In this way, the entire space of the building can be relived and covered, no longer divided by individual floors. The solution adopted, with double and triple height internal voids, is based on the idea of removing a slice of the house from man’s physical, but not sensory, use to deliver it to the light that becomes its master: that is, the refusal of the maximum exploitation of the available space in exchange for a qualitative leap in the internal dimension, rich in variations and long-range optical fields; it is the search for a magical character to be given to the use of spaces, for a sensorial surplus value that enables function.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of inclusion and how these have been met

How to rebuild the physical and semantic identity of a building hit by a natural disaster in a perspective of social and multicultural inclusion? A participatory process has therefore activated that involved Administrations and Civil Society, according to an inclusive governance model, at the end of which it was concluded that the most effective way to rehabilitate the cultural asset was not just to recover the damaged building, but mainly to rebuild the spirit of Community that it can transmit, as an expression of the inclusive social value of the territory. In wanting “to renact” the “Court theater” (the ancient agricultural court called “Il Castello”), the local actors have shown their knowledge of the places and the right to be architects of their own future.In short, the rehabilitation of the former factory was not conceived so much and only as an act of reaction to the disaster (2012 earthquake), but as a strategic process functional to the regeneration of territorial balances. After the first emergency phase, the context was redesigned according to a holistic approach which saw local and supra-local actors dialogue in participatory form, through a hybridization with territorial planning, so as to include all the items of planning. After the involvement in the first phase of planning, how will civil society participate in the life of the building? The building wants to be a “bubble of space” for everyone, a collective organism inserted in an ecosystem connected to the territory and services. The system is conceived as a collaborative work model in which owners and users synergistically partecipate in the planning of activities; the result is a shared factory-laboratory of collective knowledge able of stimulating synergies between public and private. An intervention, therefore, conducted according to the approach of inclusive  design, with the provision of spaces and services accessible by the entire civil society, a building of common experience.

Please give information on the results/impacts achieved by your project in relation to the category you apply for

On the one hand, the preservation of the wall envelope was carried out with the restoration of existing structures disfigured by the earthquake, as well as decades of alterations and vandalisms. On the other hand, while respecting the original characteristics of the building, it was necessary to provide the individual modules with a ‘slender’ structure, indipendent of the external envelope, flexible and reversible for use. The solution adopted resolves the contrast with the insertion of an internal metal structure, indipendent from the wall box, to support the intermediate deck. The restoration of the wall envelope is above all a work of liberation and consolidation. Liberation from the degrading perforated brick partitions, from the cruel infills of the original windows, from the compromised floors in masonry, from the dissonant plasters, covering the history of the factory. And therefore total recovery of the surviving elements, first off all the lively brick wall face. The philological premise, in fact, is that the entire building inside was not platered, as documented by the sufaces of the original walls. The result is a decisive morphological-structural homogeneity, the timbre of the perceptive unity of the spaces, which can be clearly seen from the visual telescope that crosses them longitudinally. The right respect for the environmental values, even the most prosaic, led the project to develop almost exclusively within the volume; on the outside, only a calibrated “scalpel shot” is allowed, the one necessary to restore the history of the building. The project was developed in the belief that any intervention on existing buildings requires a critical and creative approach. The past has no beginning, no end and is always. It’s only by questioning the past that we can search for those truths capable of reviving the building in the present, rewriting its identity in the contemporary dimension and preventing time from reducing it to a “lifeless shell”.

Please explain the way citizens benefiting from or affected by the project and civil society have been involved in the project and what has been the impact of this involvement on the project

The cultural tradition of the man-made environment is an inalienable heritage of civil society on a par with its primary natural elements. Thus, recovering the old building means returning it to the domain of the community that will be able to relive in the present, weaving new uses and multicultural experiences into it. Beyond the private configuration of the property (building at the service of bio-sustainable agriculture), the building is returned to the landscape by rewriting an operational relationship with the natural and social environment, making the public participate in its own schedule and allowing citizens to combine knowledge with new experiences. Therefore, the building is recovered as a “museum of itself”, a machine narrating its own history, and at the same time “museum of the territory” that houses it, with its delicate environmental balances: from the coexistence of these realities the public will be able to draw from past truths and those stimuli capable of reviving this factory in the present. Civil society will be able to relive that “Court life” that once hosted workers dedicated to the care of the land, in a “happy work” that strengthened their equilibrium in the rural ecosystem. The recovered spaces, flexible and ductile, can alternatively be equipped for temporary exhibitions on the products of historical craftsmanship, civilization and rural art, up to contemporary art exhibitions, in a dialectical and lively contrast between historical memory and contemporary dimension, between present and past. Result of a mixed public-private financing that synergistically combined the resources of owners with community funds for the reconstruction after the 2012 earthquake, the side wings of the building will be dedicated to: 1) one a laboratory linked to sustainable agronomy and its environmental impacts; 2) the other more specifically aimed at welcoming, consulting and socio-cultural promotion.

Please highlight the innovative character of the project

The intervention concerns the emptying of an ancient former factory from its internal structures, now compromised by a violent earthquake in 2012, and the insertion inside it of a new metal frame able to rehabilitate the building for a new functional flexibility. The existing and what is added or replaced integrate and comment on each other, in a dialogue that declares identity and differences. The assembly of modern construction materials, mechanical and serial production (iron beams), exposes the materials of the envelope, tender and handcrafted (brick facings), which from the contrast are warmer and lively. The project is therefore conservation and interpretation of the material text entrusted to it by time, and the incorporation of a mechanism suspended from the new portals, detached from the wall skin but anchored to it by means of solidarity devices. The mechanical insert inside the historical artifact is an ideological declaration of one’s otherness. An attempt is made to recover the integral dimension of the space from the old barn and therefore the possibility of perceiving the invaded space in a unitary way. The warm grain of the wall texture has been rediscovered, in order to reveal and expose its connections and stitching, accentuating the expressive message of the wall undulation. Thus, the philological rigor that guided the reinterpretation of the building led to the attribution of an almost didactic recognition to each surviving material element. The new mechanical insert approaches the old, renoucing its reverent imitation, in the name of an active contrast that rewrites uses and spatial dynamics within the existing shell. The calculated static balance translates the measured proportions of the original barn: the result is a new ‘intra-muros’ spatial articolation, the one necessary to renovate the building, evoking its past and redefining new uses capable of reviving it in the present.

Please explain how the project led to results or learnings which could be transferred to other interested parties

If there is a protagonist in the dynamic plasticity of the built, this is time. And if there is an architect’s power , this is the power to redesign the time and life of ancient buildings, trasferring them to future generations. That time that will allow the ancient buildings to produce experiences and arouse feelings that allow them to appreciate their history and beauty, even before dressing them with their intrinsic usefulness, rehabilitating them in the social schedule as the results of an eminently civil art. That time that triggers a dialectical relationships between the ancient buildings and the people, so that they can constitute their cultural habitat, where they can exercise their faculties, aspirations and curiosities. That time which has always been and which marking constructs the history of man. In re-reading the time that formed and transformed it, the building rewrites its present identity, seeking in the scarce resources available a filter against arbirtrary reinterpretations, a reason to relive and interact in the contemporary dimension. New ‘intra-muros’ uses and experiences, dynamic and flexible spaces created within the existing envelope represent the approach to revive the organism in the theater of everyday life. The intervention proposes a model for a building that is a “museum of itself”, a lively and flexible narrative mechanism capable of exposing its own history, not only maintaining the pre-existing structures in every area but designing new and evocative spaces. Furthermore, the rediscovery of the architectural particularities of the complex means that it can become a didactic exhibition of its history to be returned to the community and the future generations as an inalienable heritage. The past has no beginning, no end and is always. It is only by questioning the past that we can search for those truths capable of reviving buildings in the present, rewriting their identity and preventing time from reducing them to “empty shell".

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By ticking this box, you declare that all the information provided in this form is factually correct, that the proposed project has not been proposed for the Awards more than once under the same category and that it has not been subject to any type of investigation, which could lead to a financial correction because of irregularities or fraud.