area 127 | identity of the landscape

architect: Loris Macci with Andrea Giunti

location: Faltona, Italy

year: 2012

Simple Truth.
In the last few decades we have, in contemporary architectural design, been witnessing a brilliant and ongoing hybridizing of the traditional bond between the built form and its interior, which has come to alter the usual relationship where the figure prevails on the background, which has characterized centuries of architectural tradition. This is often done in the name of a preservation of the landscape as a heritage, in the belief that by doing so one may, even if it entails a profound change of the physical appearance of the place, retain at least its external image. In other cases it is done because the technological evolution offers us more opportunities in this direction, and in others again because, following in the wake of a presumed liberalization brought about by the new digital aesthetics, one is adopting a design approach that is more akin to the logics of sculpting than to discretization; and in other cases, yet again – and it is a matter of a very few, exceptional cases – only due to a great coherence.
The newly built composting plant designed by Loris Macci along with Andrea Guinti and the Abaco firm, in the green hills of Mugello, belongs to the latter category. It is a matter of a project whose coherence is indeed clear not only due to the rare ability of the form to only communicate what is strictly necessary, but also because of how it says it, or in other words through the soft-spoken final result based on a careful refinement of approaches and principles which pay tribute to many peculiarities, above all those of the surroundings.
The clearly defined volumes of the project efficiently communicate a general sense of continuity with the environmental structure of the context. This continuity is not only a product of references and allusions to the materials, the forms and the themes of the place; rather, it is based precisely on the physical nature of a rooting which appears as something more than and different from a simple relationship with the contours of the land. The compositive gestures of this reciprocity are measured in the balance between the excavation, the backfill, the surfacing elements and the folds in the land, due to which the built form produced by this intimate relationship between the human intervention and nature is manifested by an alternation of ramparting and green surfaces, in their turn announced by a system of retaining walls that indicate the presence of an articulated and unifying interiority.
The functional and distributive aspects are solved in a few gestures, all based on the route followed by the organic materials in the different phases of the processing. The refuse is received in an arrival area and in the first pavilion placed next to it, from which it then passes through a street-tunnel that forms as it were a backbone along the different parts of the aggregate, to reach the nine bio-cells where the organic material remains for the time necessary for the initial phase of maturing.
The homogeneous facing of the vertical walls surfacing along the sloping land is very efficient both in linguistic and functional terms. It is a matter of “drywall” facades, which form infill walls in front of the reinforced concrete skeleton behind. This system, based on a metal net cage to hold the pieces of broken stones in place, allows air to circulate only in the areas housing the plants, where necessary aided by air vents protected by automated metallic Venetian blinds.The role of the roofs is essential. The roof above the entrance pavilion and that above the pavilion where the definitive maturing takes place are designed as “inverse roofs” complete with a layer of large-particle shingle with considerable filtering properties, while the roof of the bio-cells houses large tanks in which the water is changed continuously in order to refrigerate the technical systems below.
Macci therefore writes a new page in Faltona, creating a new landscape, and everything looks as if it has always been like that, even if it has been radically altered by the project. Everything is reduced to the bare essentials: the articulation of the design is terse, the juxtaposition of the bodies is clear, the fronts are silent, while everything is dominated by the precious ability of boiling down to the quintessence, something that is further accentuated by the productive dimension of the theme.
The general coherence of the design approach adopted in this project does not enrich the architecture with any further values. It is what it is, and it is only because of what it is that it meets a prerequisite which comes before its function: that is, its truth, which is nothing but the only meaning of beauty our contemporary reality can allow for.
The simple complexity of this project therefore gives us a very efficient lesson; it is precisely because of its “simplicity” that it possesses the force, as remote as powerful, that only true works of architecture possess.