year 2024
project type academic
location Mantova
typology community centre
role student
supervisor Angelo Lorenzi
Filippo Bricolo
Nora Lombardini
Francesco Lo Monte
team Farhan Qalbain Iman
Sara Raffaglio
software AutoCAD
Revit
Rhino
Lumion
Illustrator
The ‘Antico e Nuovo’ is the final studio that we took in the fourth semester of the Master program. The goal of this design studio is to apply all the knowledge that we have learnt in the past two years in a requalification project in Mantova for a church and a former convent that was turned into a residential function. We were tasked to turn the place into a community centre to resurrect the activity of the space, while maintaining the historical soul of the place itself.
Our team decided to do an ‘operation’ of which we made our intervention to be as ‘light’ as possible, to achieve the greatest effects with the least amount of disturbance. We tried to revive the courtyards that we deemed as the ‘soul’ of the place, thus our design decisions move towards the creation of a series of radial introverted spaces that faces inwards rather than out. The public spaces are pulled towards the centre of the spaces, while the privates are pushed out. Visual access to the courtyards are also not interrupted. The operations of the interventions, we made them in a surgical manner: removals are done only in essential places and only of important causes, not doing a ‘face uplift’ as the sign of the passing of time is a beauty that must be honestly shown; the additions on the other hand, are light and thin, as invisible as possible, yet as apparent with the contrast of materials, and the new technologies and construction techniques that sets themselves apart. Bak Gordon once commends 'everything you did is done with such a mathematical precision, it is a perfect intervention, a perfect project, there is nothing more to say' to our project – he was acting as a visiting professor for our studio in May 2024.