PINOCCHIO CHILDREN’S LIBRARY COMPETITION – 2018

The project depends on the reading of the context and on the requests of the competition brief. From the context emerges: a luxuriant landscape delimited by verdant ridges among which rises the village of Collodi engraved by the Pescia stream; the small size of its building that also characterizes the downstream expansion; a retaining wall and a slight slope that define the banks of the stream; the former paper factory, an artefact that for its dimensions emerges from the surrounding landscape.

The competition brief, on the other hand, consists of a complex functional program that requires the construction of about 9000 square meters. Their placement on the surface, despite the reuse of the former paper factory, would have resulted in a large artefact, out of scale with respect to the context.

That’s the reason why the first project choice was to situate the required spaces under the urban quota, in the thickness of the ground that characterizes the entire area. An impact zero strategy, which does not alter the quality of the landscape and allows to create, at the urban scale, a park, inside which the former paper factory remains the only emerging element, from which it accesses the submerged spaces that are discovered and experienced as you enter it.

This submerged world emerges and relates to the landscape through fragments of architecture that, both with the small volumes and terraces on the side of the stream or in the excavated patios along the park, assume the same scale as the surrounding buildings, and establish an harmonious relationship with them. The new architecture does not hide at all, but renounces being a display of itself, manifesting in a measured and silent way, dialoguing and enhancing the existing historical and natural context.

This strategy confirms the role of the former paper factory and the stream as ordering elements, assuming their directionality to build the orthogonal grid that structures the project.

The dimension of each space depends on this grid: the distributive ones, the ones used for the different functions and the patios and the volumes facing the torrent. Both the latters relate the above and the below, internal and external, revealing the existence of the submerged world that manifests itself to the urban level through their reduced scale, able, as previously remarked, to dialogue and not overwhelm the surrounding building.

PROGETTO: G. Forte, A. Pilati, A. Sciolari, G. Spirito

COLLABORATORI: Alessandro Sciolari