{"id":27700,"date":"2014-07-11T10:31:22","date_gmt":"2014-07-11T08:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/i-a-c-p-2\/"},"modified":"2016-05-20T11:07:58","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T09:07:58","slug":"i-a-c-p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/i-a-c-p\/","title":{"rendered":"I.A.C.P."},"content":{"rendered":"

January 2006, the phone of my firm rings, the caller is engineer Maurizio Urbinati of the institute for low-income housing of Ancona. bAfter some civilities he tells me \u201carchitect Gambardella, we have erected the skeleton of the building you designed in 2000, but we have had to sell a strip of land to the neighbours in exchange for a better accessibility to the building site, and we would therefore need you to redesign the end of the body of terraces from which you enter the dwellings\u201d.
\nAmazed, I answer yes mechanically, and that project from six years before, which I had completely forgotten, resurfaces among the recesses of my memory.\u00a0Everything had begun in 1998, when I participated\u00a0in the fifth edition of Europan, an international competition for young architects centred on the subject of innovative housing.\u00a0Among the available lots\u00a0I chose a vast area in the city of Ancona, and imagined a vegetal enclave surrounded by houses, offices and shops.\u00a0I won the competition but\u00a0not long afterwards I made\u00a0a grotesque discovery.\u00a0The municipality of Ancona, after having guaranteed the availability of the area, had changed its mind and sold it to a private operator in order\u00a0to turn it into a shopping mall.
\nDiscouraged, I though of the usual Italian curse, of the won competition which remained on paper.\u00a0On the contrary, the council chairman for town planning D\u2019Alessio had a brilliant idea and, along with the Europan secretariat, established that we would realize a small project on the city outskirts, on areas that the Municipality had sold to the institute for low-income housing which would, in its turn, finance the project and its realization.\u00a0Everything seemed to be solved, and when I visited the area I found it very pretty, located next to a building designed by Danilo Guerri, overlooking a green valley with the Adriatic glimmering\u00a0in the distance.
\nThe assignment was very complex, even if it only consisted of the realization of twelve dwellings. It was a matter of apartments for foreigners, disabled persons, etc., in short, something that was, theoretically speaking, very politically correct.\u00a0It was practically a matter of an assignment with a ridiculous budget which the customer expected to be sufficient to produce a civil architecture of great value in terms of town planning and landscape design. And this was quite a challenge, considering that I had to make do with about 60,000 euro for each dwelling including parking areas, basements, terraces and common green areas.\u00a0I had to limit myself to the final drawings; it was impossible to supervise the works, and there was not even a shade of any artistic direction.\u00a0The dwellings varied in size between 65 and 95 square meters. The plot consisted of\u00a0a steep slope.\u00a0I decided to do two very clear things. I built a single two-story building, focusing on\u00a0a basic volume.
\nThe apartments has bedrooms on the side towards the slope, and living rooms facing the view. The fa\u00e7ade with a view features a plan and elevation animated by a continuous play of projections and recessed parts which creates a different and independent development for each floor, avoiding\u00a0a repetitive perspective effect.\u00a0The result is a fa\u00e7ade corrugated by shades.\u00a0In the upper part, on the contrary, I imagine an empty building, a concrete frame that serves as a passage. The long canopy on the front, facing the street, covers the parking areas dedicated to the inhabitants and forms a pedestrian street with opened and covered spaces of a collective character, an aggregate of terraces that offer glimpses of the landscape.\u00a0The two independent architectures, the massive and the void, are united through a light system of bridges and shelters in metal which lead to the single dwellings, distinguishing the domestic environment from the shared spaces of the condominium.\u00a0The design of this upper area is intentionally linear, as opposed to the movement of the side facing the view. The apparent simplicity is in any case enlivened by long corridors of shade and reflections.\u00a0Everything is designed with banal elements: the banister made from vertical reinforcement rods, the cylinder-shaped pilotis,\u00a0the casing in pre-varnished aluminium.\u00a0The rolling Venetian blinds are in ivory-coloured PVC.\u00a0The building is white, the pilotis grey, the banisters white, and the external floors in Travertine stone and reinforced concrete.\u00a0Everything had to be simple\u00a0to execute, without any room for misinterpretation.\u00a0The interiors have doors in blue laminated panels, floors in slate and the columns of the living rooms are painted in bright colours, in order to make the assignees identify with the colour of their apartment.\u00a0The project was delivered in the summer of 2000 but the movement of two high voltage pylons located near the area proved much more complex than expected, to the point of making the abandonment of the building project anything but unlikely.\u00a0I had lost all hope until that phone call of two years ago, but then this architecture of mine, which I may by now define a youthful work, has finally abandoned the realm of imagination, to encounter the architectural solidity of its appearance.<\/p>\n