heritage enclaves
year
2024
project type
competition
location
Curinga
typology
pavilion
role
team
team
Farhan Qalbain Iman
Riccardo Meneghello
Diego Andrade
software
AutoCAD
Rhino
Lumion
Illustrator
Photoshop
This project was born from our solutions for problems posed by the competition: the participants were asked to protect and musealize a roman bath ruins set in the middle of a countryside in southern Italy. For us, to have a correct answer to the problems lies in understanding the objects: we started the design process with a historical research on roman baths and understanding the territory of which the specific case study lies on. It then turned into discussions, sometimes lengthy while some others were brief, sketches, models, and sometimes texts.
Then, what were the answers that we proposed? We did not think of putting a roof to the ruin for protection as it would contradict our understanding of the ruin, we just made walls around it to reduce decays from the blowing winds - ruins are signs of times that had passed, and will stay that way also for the future. They are meant to be remembered, to be known, to be understood. What we thought is important is to restore it: to reimagine and to be captivated by it. Thus we concepted a symbolical walk through the ruins itself, following the ‘reconstruction’ of the bath, inviting you to have an imaginative yet personal interpretation of the space. We complement the walk with a pavilion of the same material, bricks, capped with an undulating white roof, designed by following the traditions of the place as a nod of respect to the ruin itself.
protect
access
inhabit
For this competition, I did heavy works on modelling: since I felt the model provided by the organizer are quite insufficient, I recreated the model of the ruins from a drone video that was also provided. I also made the isometry diagram since it was a pretty straightforward once we have the 3D model, we went for the simple but powerful path in this competition – almost a San Rocco-look. Riccardo drew the beautiful plan and the sections. He also did the postprocessing for our renderings, while I provided him the bases.
We entitled the project as 'Heritage Enclaves: Architectural and Archaeological Resonance'. Then, allow me to re-write on the following paragraph the text that we put on the boards – which was written also by Riccardo if I remember correctly.
aerial view of the ruins and the pavilion
the ruins enclosed by the perimeter walls with a hint of the pavilion in the background
the texture and materiality of the pavilion facing the ruins
entrance to the pavilion from the perimeter
“...their beautiful measures can already be guessed; they do not need our understanding. And besides, they have already served, they are even surpassed. All this makes me happy.” - Bertolt Brecht
The proposal assumes a complex region of architecture, it has been placed in the middle of a dialectical relationship between history and built element, closeness and distance, mythology and certainty, and above all, life and death. Then, the proposed resolving elements are artifacts of conciliation and continuity; that do not forget that the past ruin, by itself, persists as a sign; representative and eloquent, a tale that brings joyfulness to the mortals who dare to perceive it.
The pavilion tests the architectural tradition of the place, an evocative room, which keeps, in plan and section, the proportions of the existing ruin, whose roof, in a kind of gravitational benevolence, has been granted a series of suspended white vaults that virtually praise the constructive knowledge of the ruin, which still remains as “a lesson of architecture”, as Giorgio Grassi would say. This stereotomic operation is nothing but a folding of reinforced brick, which can be replicated infinitely.
Its function renews the raison d’être of the ruin, it is a collective space, a key point to exhibit objects, artifacts, and even provide academic and educational talks for the revaluation of the place. It is part of that magnum opus, already begun, which is older, wiser and beyond our reach. The pavilion, then, is both an unexpected and repeated intervention, yet it will always be a proof of truth.
And as a final act that is at the same time a beginning, six cypresses guard the ruin; a mythological analogy that praises the Roman imaginary of the eternal, axis mundi, vertical nature that rises nobly as a symbol of victory over the inevitable passage of time.
