antico e nuovo

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

Maria Gaia Cicconi

Rania Abdelmeguied

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.

The general concept of the design, the spatial organization, and the functions are decided democratically in group meetings. Then, the work done to produce all the required drawings are split between each members of the group according to our own 'specialties'.The plans and sections are drawn together, with the final compiling and post processing done by Gaia and Sara. They are also the ones in charge of our grand design guidelines for our final presentations.The modelling of the design was left to my and Rania's hands. We used both Rhino and Revit. Since we were not given any base models, it was up to us to rebuild the whole thing from scratch.I personally did all of the detailing and the structural part, including the design and the drawings. The physical model – the maquette – is also mostly me, at least the biggest one, with help here and there from the others.

The visualization part, Rania and I provided the base. It was up to Gaia to do post processing on them. In the end, we have a mix between raw images from the rendering software, and a collection of a postprocessed visual.Again, what we were trying to achieve in the visualization is to show the lightness and transparency in our intervention. Materials chosen are mostly glass and metal, which we all know is very modern and can be molded to our needs without needing to have thick profiles.We put all of our drawings in a panel which unfortunately would be to big to be uploaded. Thus, I have taken apart the images for you to see.