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Architects: Calvi Ceschia Viganò architetti associati
- Area: 6450 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Aldo Amoretti
Text description provided by the architects. We set ourselves the goal of "educating" a 1960s building built to house the headquarters of the city court. The building was now obsolete from every point of view, urban, architectural and energy but located in an extremely interesting context, characterized by its proximity to the large building of the Pascoli school, by the overwhelming beauty of the neighboring Nobel gardens and by the presence of a monumental specimen of Ficus Macrophylla located between the building and the pedestrian and cycle track. The new intended use provides for the construction of 42 sheltered housing for the elderly, a housing community, as well as spaces dedicated to common services such as clinics, the physiotherapy gym, collective meeting rooms, restaurants. Each formal choice was strongly conditioned by the realization of such a specific function.
From the future manager of the facility, a company that can boast 70,000 beds in Europe, precise metric and functional constraints have arrived, while for us, the input to meet very high energy, structural, and environmental sustainability criteria, so we have made very stringent technological and philosophical choices. The project was born with an authentically green and glocal soul. It is an architecture that uses simple formal language; by making "local" material choices, he acts with a global contemporary vision. The technology is there but not seen.
One of the key choices was to bring the Villa Nobel park to the roof of the building. In the project, this happens, without interruption, thanks to the new articulation of the volumes and the study of the external paths. This operation led to an overall volumetric recalibration of the building, thanks to which it was possible to proportion the front overlooking Porto Sole and the cycle path, to find a balanced relationship with the park and the access road. In this way, a series of thematic gardens and green spaces are created, always accessible even by people with reduced mobility. An accommodation for the elderly cannot be separated from the open spaces, and these spaces must be articulated both as public and private spaces, therefore it has been important to guarantee as much of the accommodation as possible also exclusive outdoor spaces such as loggias or terraces. In the overall reading of the building, this differentiation contributes to giving easy recognition to the floors: the external articulation effect of the overlapping volumes takes away the effect of seriality, both externally and internally, because they are characterized by loggias or terraces galleries.
Housing innovation is typological. Guests have the opportunity to welcome, for short periods, a friend or relative in full autonomy. This expedient will allow the elderly guest a free social experience and will therefore be very useful to improve the psychological performance of his stay. It is the realization of the same concept expressed in the external architectural language that tends to avoid any possible feeling of alienation and facilitates socializing both in the context of family affections and relations with other guests.
