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Enlargement of the hotel on the ski tracks at La Thuille.

The former barrack turned into Hotel in 2000 was renewed by adding space for hospitality with a new hall and some themed rooms that frame the landscape.

The project for the new SAE campus in Milan works with the brand multiplication. The logo is translated into signage, furnishing and architecture, in order to communicate the company identity, mission and values to let more effectively experience those by students and people. SAE visual identity, constituted by horizontal lines, is broken down into its elements to turn into an architectural element, thus a more effective communication tool. The logo becomes the visual matrix of the facade, and wrap the building like a second skin, creating engaging graphic effects. The breakdown of those blue lines transfers an image or message and creates a double level of reading. The blue lines invade interior spaces as a pattern becoming a both a visual and structural element. They run through corridors as way-finding elements incorporating signage. It’s an imaginary pentagram that unfolds itself turning into a seat at the entrance of the school and a light pattern that shows the way to the reception and welcome students.

The architectural development of the library consists mostly on a restoration aimed at preserving and protecting the external structure and some existing interiors. The distribution of interiors is organized to better respond to all the needs and allow proper livability in all areas.
The dislocation of the rooms follows a logic linked to the theory of silence, so that to each space is guaranteed the correct relationship between the activity and necessary environmental conditions.
The essential concepts pursued are: the facilitation of the entry and the crossing interiors to allow freedom and spontaneity of use; the remodeling of the interior spaces working on new or existing architectural qualities; the identification of the rooms so that the building becomes a single neutral container whose interior spaces are highly qualified.
The library is a piece of furniture coming out of the Teca in the living room and invades the city hosting the events’ advertising and suggests, as a viral marketing, a spontaneous network of book crossing.
The projections on the building permit to intervene in a reversible way on the skin of theTeca, turning it into a medium itself, ready to amaze and inform.
The front of the building becomes a display for an informative and artistic use: ephemeral architecture but highly communicative.

An urban mirage beneath the shade of the sky

Keep a steady foothold on the ground and the head above the clouds, wander in a dreamlike dimension just to find out that, this time, you’re actually experiencing a “daydream”… The key to the whole project are the metaphors of illusion, paradox and incongruence, which are allowed to take place and channelled into a playful and fantastic vision.

An ethereal and strange urban oasis, a playful break in the midst of frenzied city life. For those that accept to believe in it and want to see it, a true urban mirage. It’s a complex of wooden platforms, interlaced or apart from one another, creating a great, fully-furnished stage, to be used all day long, to sit or lay down on, to cross or to “challenge”.

They are mirrored stalls reflecting the sky, fractioning clouds in a series of planes at differing heights; but they are also green pillows, to lay on gazing at the sky, looking beyond the horizon, engulfed in an inebriating mint fragrance. They are benches, laid down like music sheets, spreading throughout the space, composing harmonies -dissonant from time to time- and their staves look like notes, arranged in rhythmical fashion that, sometimes, manage to climb towards the sky.  The theme of paradox comes in the shape of the two great slabs, hovering three meters above the ground, apparently propped in the air just by water jets.

These roofs are actually supported by ladders, using their strong metaphysical appearance to dissimulate their crucial structural role. Right in front of them, a smaller plane contributes in giving and even higher value to its magical look as the smaller, lighter plane actually floats in the air, supported by nothing but intermittent water jets, allowing it to appear and suddenly disappear, to float and then blend back again in the pavement, granting surprised reactions every time.

Seen from a distance, its evanescent and surprising apparent levitation, make the design look like an “urban mirage”: from up close, it’s a great playing space, in which to enjoy shade, fresh air and cool water sprinkles.

In such a kaleidoscopic world, water jets act according to a carefully planned scheme, giving life to a “calendar of nebulized events”: sometimes, they gather together to form almost impenetrable pillars, sometimes they reach different heights, sometimes they are also temporary “water walls” that create a separate room.

Inside this “house under the leaf”, the use becomes ritual, a token to an all-new “method for staying”. Underneath this great roof, shade is assured, dotted by round windows looking straight at the sky.

All the elements described so far – from stairs used as “fantasy exercise machines” to water becoming game/event/building and even structural material, from lights marking the edges of the individual planes, making them “float” in the space, to the cyan colour that gives the installation its distinctive look, enhancing the awkward feeling emanating from it – cooperate in order to lead the spectator through a great “theatre of the absurd”

Others might look at it as a contemporary form of the traditional fountain, its formal values reversed…its “essence”, though, is kept intact despite the transformation, just like its magical role of gathering and perhaps granting our wishes, traditionally trusted to coins, thrown in the water with a little bit of thrill. This ritual is obviously redesigned to work “upside-down”: the coin is now thrown into the air, attracted and captured by an invisible magnetic field and creating, on the underside of the roofing slab, a texture varying both in shape and density.

Those are our dreams, given as gifts to the sky, they are also the dreams of Rome, seemingly floating into thin air, just waiting to fly away…

A European chef arrives in Pechino  to open a restaurant, the Riverclub, a place for meeting and exchange, comparison and storytelling between ancient thoughts and knowledgeable research.
The internal fit-out continues the exchange of ideas between the chef and the architects in the project to renovate the historic Piccolo Lago in Mergozzo and with the design of “il milione” (the million) dish.
For the Peking restaurant the core element of the design lies in the meeting between western and eastern civilisation, but it has been in developing the subsequent pairs of reference terms, in a complementary manner, that the dining room, kitchen and furnishings have been designed to be able to tell and be coherent parts of the atmosphere. Identity and recurrence, experience and exploration, tradition and innovation, classic and modern are the related differentiations of the themes tackled by the architecture and design to capture, maintain and suggest the signs of a possible way to connect the two worlds.

6000mq of nature and a villa to project. Based on these assumptions comes two proposals for a villa that integrates seamlessly with the surrounding space:

Nature inside the villa

The house arises from terraces shaped following the natural inclination of the hillside, and it is build around two private patios which let nature !ow inside in several ways. Precious plants grow in the private gardens, sunlight enters “ltered by transparent basins or draws floors and wall decoration passing through perforated sunscreens, windows frames garden and landscape views, meanwhile water flows through the building and all round the gardens by means of fountains and watergames. Even if the house is widely closed in itself it communicates to the outside its own identity through walls and window screens decorations depicting natural patterns chosen by landlords.

Villa inside the nature

The house is constitued by a group of detached room-volumes, connected by glass skinned corridors

and passages. The villa is therefore projected toward the surrounding garden, de”ning a more intimate open space in between its volumes. To rather emphasize this effect a shading surface wraps around the whole house as a light tent, partially covering and partially transparent to the view, not to interfere with the natural landscape.

The different volumes are covered with different materials: the nigh areas are decorated with a skin of perforated corten steel panels, the volume toward the lower part of the hillside is instead covered with a green wall to increase the mimetic effect of the house, lastly, the leisure volume is made of ground coloured concrete, all the corridor and passages are instead enclosed with glass sheets.

Better city – better life! This is the slogan of the Shangai’s EXPO. This means the chance of carefree living in a place carefully designed. According to the plan and to his promises, the term “city” can’t indicate only the big “urban agglomerate” but it also have to refer to all the spaces man-builded for living and working, to develop his own personality and build relations with other people.

Although the project that we are here presenting is not located in a dense urban scenario, it still contemplates a large real estate development in an holiday site with important naturalistic qualities but also with a good quality of the connections and infrastructure typical of the small metropolis. This contextualization has take us to imagine Sanya as a place were the quality of the small villages on the sea side could meet the quality and the services for the leisure of the main and historical resort.

This document is the report of a process of focusing to a more equilibrate solution to the asking for an high quality real estate developing who take care to the intrinsic quality of the places. A design process that tries to mediate between the strong space connotation of the human action and the desire to take  from the form and rhythms of the nature the project matrix.

House, office, store.
A house that is wrapped on itself and materializes formally in multiple functions: a private space, a public space and a space where the two spheres penetrate.
It is an inclined floor “space”, available both as office for informal meetings and as residence of living room.
The inclined floor area becomes a functional joint and a symbolic building.
A floor that is divided into different levels and includes soft seats, a bar area, a reading area; a sequence of steps “eroded” by the daily use that configure an abnormal “home-theater”…
The distinction in functional areas with separate entrances, will allow in the future the sale of three divided apartments.