'Il Castello' former factory restoration in the Emilia Romagna countryside, Ferrara, Italy
Born for the drying of tobacco and synthesis of a landscape intended for work, the ancient factory called ‘Il Castello’ is recovered for new uses, opening up to the Community as a court of collective knowledge, theater of public-private synergies aimed at regenerating the land over which it dominates. Respect for environmental values has led the intervention to develop almost exclusively inside the building, reconfigured in order to restore its semantic identity in the contemporary dimension.
Local
Italy
Emilia-Romagna
Mainly rural
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
2021-01-28
As an individual
First name: Moreno Last name: Pivetti Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: San Nicolo' Street, 7 Town: Parma Postal code: 43121 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 329 612 9051 E-mail:morenopivetti@libero.it Website:http://www.morenopivettiarchitecture.com
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Yes
New European Bauhaus or European Commission websites
The building object of the intervention constitutes the housing and production section of the historic court called “Il Castello”, located where the Alto Ferrarese area fades from the Modenese valleys, between provinces related by family, “frontier land” with precarious hydraulic balances. The project provides the recovery of the mighty barycentric building at the court, one hundred meters long and resolved in the expansive articulation of eight lateral modules joined by five aerial central arches. The restoration of the former factory has combined the aspects of strengthening and seismic improvement of the structures with those concerning the critical rereading of the material text, in order to restore the semantics of the construction schedule. The unitary character of the building suggested wearing the homeopath’s gloves, recovering it from the outside to its harmonic image and obtaining uses within it that are compatible and non intrusive. The structural solution refuses to show itself in order to silently harmonize with the architecture. Respect for environmental values, even the most prosaic, leads the project to develop almost exclusively within the volume, emptying it and reconfiguring it; outside, only a few calibrated “scalpel blows” are allowed, the one necessary to restore the history of the building. Inside the perimeter, on the order hand, double and triple height voids have been obtained, with multiple views, without however distorting the share of decks and ‘rediscovered’ windows. From the balcony-study obtained in the mezzanine, the free spaces are dominated within which the staircase climbs and the living room develops, from the respective decks, through the existing windows and the reopened arched ones, you have a “long view” of the infinite countryside. The partial emptying of the internal volumes allows the amplification of the spaces, in depth and in height, giving the sense of a confortable building.
knowledge factory
Socio-ecological environment
Supportive design
Participatory process
Cultural heritage
How can design contribute to sustainability and how can the roots of an ancient building contribute to obtaining workspaces with the right ventilation and temperature, while mantaining a zero impact on the environment? The key to the sustainability recovery of the building was wrtitten in its historical identity and in its morphological-constructive nature. Born as a factory in the form of a passive machine, capable of capturing, distributing and regulating the air currents to ensure the temperature drying of tabacco and hemp, the factory was equipped with an intelligent and effective natural ventilation system that across the lateral sections according to their longitudinal development, favoring the right microclimate from products and workers. In its transformation from “machine à produire” to machine of collective knowledege, the building retains its matrix of passive system and makes it a primary resource to recover spaces for new uses, without altering its semantic message. The perimeter walls recovered with mortars based on natural raw materials, with their mass help to temper the work spaces without resorting to invasive thermoregulation systems. The caretaker’s house is lined with an internal layer of rock wool and is equipped with a high energy underfloor heating system activated by a heat pump that excludes the use of fossil coal. In addition to the energy self-sufficiency of the building, the food self-sufficiency of those who work and live there is also guaranteed, who will consume fruit and vegetables produced at zero km in the neighboring gardens. The renunciation of chemical synthesis materials and sophisticated thermoregulation technologies and the use, instead, of natural materials and systems discreetly integrated into the architecture of the spaces are the formula for restoring an eco-sustainable building using the tools of the archaic primitive common sense. In the right design sustainability in nothing more than the rigorous use of common sense.
The enhancement project of the former factory combined the aspects of the recovery of the structures with those concerning the critical re-reading of the material text, in order to restore the semantics of the constructive schedule. The unitary character of the building suggested putting on the homeopath’s gloves, recovering from the outside to its harmonic image and obtaining internal uses that are capable and not intrusive. The structural solution refuses to exhibit in order to harmonize with the architecture, recovering an envelope within which to create new homes and work spaces. Recovering a building compromised by a natural disaster certainly means redefining its structures, but also reiventing the sense of living in it, creating spases included between existing walls, whose history suggests keeping. The right respect for environmental values, even the most prosaic, leads the project to develop almost exclusively within the volume, emptying it and reconfiguring it; outside, only a few calibrated “scalpel blows” are allowed, the one necessary to restore the history of the building. The decisive key of the project lies in the need to reduce spaces and surfaces that are initially scarcely used; this made it possible to obtain internal voids with double or triple height, with multiple views over the infinite countryside. In this way, the entire space of the building can be relived and covered, no longer divided by individual floors. The solution adopted, with double and triple height internal voids, is based on the idea of removing a slice of the house from man’s physical, but not sensory, use to deliver it to the light that becomes its master: that is, the refusal of the maximum exploitation of the available space in exchange for a qualitative leap in the internal dimension, rich in variations and long-range optical fields; it is the search for a magical character to be given to the use of spaces, for a sensorial surplus value that enables function.
How to rebuild the physical and semantic identity of a building hit by a natural disaster in a perspective of social and multicultural inclusion? A participatory process has therefore activated that involved Administrations and Civil Society, according to an inclusive governance model, at the end of which it was concluded that the most effective way to rehabilitate the cultural asset was not just to recover the damaged building, but mainly to rebuild the spirit of Community that it can transmit, as an expression of the inclusive social value of the territory. In wanting “to renact” the “Court theater” (the ancient agricultural court called “Il Castello”), the local actors have shown their knowledge of the places and the right to be architects of their own future. In short, the rehabilitation of the former factory was not conceived so much and only as an act of reaction to the disaster (2012 earthquake), but as a strategic process functional to the regeneration of territorial balances.
After the first emergency phase, the context was redesigned according to a holistic approach which saw local and supra-local actors dialogue in participatory form, through a hybridization with territorial planning, so as to include all the items of planning. After the involvement in the first phase of planning, how will civil society participate in the life of the building? The building wants to be a “bubble of space” for everyone, a collective organism inserted in an ecosystem connected to the territory and services. The system is conceived as a collaborative work model in which owners and users synergistically partecipate in the planning of activities; the result is a shared factory-laboratory of collective knowledge able of stimulating synergies between public and private. An intervention, therefore, conducted according to the approach of inclusive design, with the provision of spaces accessible by the entire civil society, a building-factory theater of inclusive experience.
The cultural tradition of the man-made environment is an inalienable heritage of civil society on a par with its primary natural elements. Thus, recovering the old building means returning it to the domain of the community that will be able to relive in the present, weaving new uses and multicultural experiences into it.
Beyond the private configuration of the property (building at the service of bio-sustainable agriculture), the building is returned to the landscape by rewriting an operational relationship with the natural and social environment, making the public participate in its own schedule and allowing citizens to combine knowledge with new experiences. Therefore, the building is recovered as a “museum of itself”, a machine narrating its own history, and at the same time “museum of the territory” that houses it, with its delicate environmental balances: from the coexistence of these realities the public will be able to draw from past truths and those stimuli capable of reviving this factory in the present, preventing time from reducing it to an “empty shell”. Civil society will be able to relive that “Court life” that once hosted workers dedicated to the care of the land, in a “happy work” that strengthened their equilibrium in the rural ecosystem. The recovered spaces, flexible and ductile, can alternatively be equipped for temporary exhibitions on the products of historical craftsmanship, civilization and rural art, up to contemporary art exhibitions, in a dialectical and lively contrast between historical memory and contemporary dimension, between present and past. Result of a mixed public-private financing that synergistically combined the resources of owners with community funds for the reconstruction after the 2012 earthquake, the side wings of the building will be dedicated to: 1) one a laboratory linked to sustainable agronomy and its environmental impacts; 2) the other more specifically aimed at welcoming, consulting and socio-cultural promotion.
In 2012, a violent earthquake hit the territories of the Emilia Romagna region, in Italy, and with them the built heritage, an expression of its social and cultural identity. We immediately decided to activate a ‘Participatory Design Process’ with che community, arriving at an economically sustainable project with the budgeted resources and inclusive of all stakeholders. The tremors had broken not only the constructive fabric (houses and workplaces) but also the social fabric that inhabited over it. The ‘sustainable regeneration’ process envisages two key points: listening to the Community’s priorities and networking with the government structures (local, regional, and national), in order to better direct economic resources. The ancient factory expressed the “collective identity” of the territory, which was fully represented in the landscape that surrounded it. These and other elements made us understand how complex the demand from the various interested parties was. And so, in addition to erasing the wounds that the earthquake had inflicted on the material structures of the building, we looked for solutions that gave answers to other needs and objecties: thus the idea was born of a building which, in addition to being seismically safe, could simultaneously become a place of leisure and well-being, meeting and social relationship, capable of welcoming all people in the form of a regenerated ‘Court’ of collective knowledge. The coordination of different resources and interventions has been the central and delicate issue of the regenerative process. Moreover, participating served as a therapy to alleviate the damage and inconvenience caused by the earthquake and as an opportunity to share and build, all together, a vision for a sustainable future. The conviction is mature that one can get out of a tragedy by reiventing oneself, preserving what is good about the culture of the places and also activating new objectives and conquests.
From the Participatory Process that involved the community affected by the earthquake, no answers emerged, but criticalities and questions that needed to be interpreted in the light of technical knowledge. While on the one hand the restoration project involved a team of designers engaged in rehabilitation and enhancement of the structures of the ancient building, on the other hand the regenerative process was enriched with knowledge and professional figures deriving from other disciplines and fields of application, according to a holistic vision which sees in the project the interaction and synthesis of different forces at play. A team of designers took care of the entire restoration project of the compromised building, from the initial survey of the damages to the reduction of its intrinsic vulnerabilities. In defining and developing the structural calculation methods, the engineers interpreted the results of the geo-mechanical analysis of the foundation soils conducted in situ by geologists and seismic micro-faulting experts. In prefiguring new uses and functions – or in rehabilitating existing ones – the architects translated the results of various studies, investigations and evaluations carried out by archaeologists, supervisors, municipal technicians and Territorial Planning personnel into living spaces. In assessing the impact of the intervention on the surrounding environment and in defining which works should harmonize its reintegration, the team included landscape architects, agronomists, botanists, sustainability experts, and management engineers. The entire regenerative process was monitored by static testers and adiministrative technicians who verified the results and regularity of the works, instructors and bank lenders who checked and reported the costs, verifying the balance with the available resources. The project, therefore, is a synthesis and a call-to-action of all the forces involved, inclusive of all the voices and knowledge of the territory.
On the one hand, the preservation of the wall envelope was carried out with the restoration of existing structures disfigured by the earthquake, as well as decades of alterations and vandalisms. On the other hand, while respecting the original characteristics of the building, it was necessary to provide the individual modules with a ‘slender’ structure, indipendent of the external envelope, flexible and reversible for use. The solution adopted resolves the contrast with the insertion of an internal metal structure, indipendent from the wall box, to support the intermediate deck. The restoration of the wall envelope is above all a work of liberation and consolidation. Liberation from the degrading perforated brick partitions, from the cruel infills of the original windows, from the compromised floors in masonry, from the dissonant plasters, covering the history of the factory. And therefore total recovery of the surviving elements, first off all the lively brick wall face. The philological premise, in fact, is that the entire building inside was not platered, as documented by the sufaces of the original walls. The result is a decisive morphological-structural homogeneity, the timbre of the perceptive unity of the spaces, which can be clearly seen from the visual telescope that crosses them longitudinally. The right respect for the environmental values, even the most prosaic, led the project to develop almost exclusively within the volume; on the outside, only a calibrated “scalpel shot” is allowed, the one necessary to restore the history of the building. The project was developed in the belief that any intervention on existing buildings requires a critical and creative approach. The past has no beginning, no end and is always. It’s only by questioning the past that we can search for those truths capable of reviving the building in the present, rewriting its identity in the contemporary dimension and preventing time from reducing it to a “lifeless shell”.
The intervention concerns the emptying of an ancient former factory from its internal structures, now compromised by a violent earthquake in 2012, and the insertion inside it of a new metal frame able to rehabilitate the building for a new functional flexibility. The existing and what is added or replaced integrate and comment on each other, in a dialogue that declares identity and differences. The assembly of modern construction materials, mechanical and serial production (iron beams), exposes the materials of the envelope, tender and handcrafted (brick facings), which from the contrast are warmer and lively. The project is therefore conservation and interpretation of the material text entrusted to it by time, and the incorporation of a mechanism suspended from the new portals, detached from the wall skin but anchored to it by means of solidarity devices. The mechanical insert inside the historical artifact is an ideological declaration of one’s otherness. An attempt is made to recover the integral dimension of the space from the old barn and therefore the possibility of perceiving the invaded space in a unitary way. The warm grain of the wall texture has been rediscovered, in order to reveal and expose its connections and stitching, accentuating the expressive message of the wall undulation. Thus, the philological rigor that guided the reinterpretation of the building led to the attribution of an almost didactic recognition to each surviving material element. The new mechanical insert approaches the old, renoucing its reverent imitation, in the name of an active contrast that rewrites uses and spatial dynamics within the existing shell. The calculated static balance translates the measured proportions of the original barn: the result is a new ‘intra-muros’ spatial articolation, the one necessary to renovate the building, evoking its past and redefining new uses capable of reviving it in the present.
After being abandoned for years, an old former factory is now a collaborative space of culture in free circulation. Located in a small rural town of Italy hit by earthquake in 2012, the court has become a point of reference for an open network of creators, thinkers and entrepreneurs of the area. Planners, municipalities, volunteers and citizens in general have contributed to regenerating the space. The site hosts various satellite projects and initiatives, co-learning workshops focused on bio-sustainable agricultural production, spaces for training and applied investigation, educational and neighborhood gardens. “Il Castello” represents a continuous process of relationships, of reconstruction of the sense of community and rethinking of the collective space. Involvement was the key to transforming the physical and philosophical dimensions of the cultural asset. Our initiative has given new life to an ancient building by seeking creative solutions to work with resources. We have developed a sustainable economic approach to our project. Slowly rebuilding a community requires patience, listening and care. In this sense, we organize ourselves flexibly because we are trying to create a sustainable human infrastructure that is resiliente to changes, reformulations and future renovations.
“Il Castello” aims to give free access to the culture, ideas and resources of our territory. Collaboration is one of our core values, so we propose an open hub where everyone can freely engage in social activities. In fact, we believe in the participatory design process as a methodology. Building together is a powerfull tool for creating communities. “Il Castello” is a space for everyone: we want to promote sustainable growth opportunities in our community. To do this we host a series of free and open events and workshops for locals and people from outside the region. Through this activities, we also want to provide them with tools and strategies to seek their own cultural expression.
If there is a protagonist in the dynamic plasticity of the built, this is time. And if there is an architect’s power , this is the power to redesign the time and life of ancient buildings, trasferring them to future generations. That time that will allow the ancient buildings to produce experiences and arouse feelings that allow them to appreciate their history and beauty, even before dressing them with their intrinsic usefulness, rehabilitating them in the social schedule as the results of an eminently civil art. That time that triggers a dialectical relationships between the ancient buildings and the people, so that they can constitute their cultural habitat, where they can exercise their faculties, aspirations and curiosities. That time which has always been and which marking constructs the history of man.
In re-reading the time that formed and transformed it, the building rewrites its present identity, seeking in the scarce resources available a filter against arbirtrary reinterpretations, a reason to relive and interact in the contemporary dimension. New ‘intra-muros’ uses and experiences, dynamic and flexible spaces created within the existing envelope represent the approach to revive the organism in the theater of everyday life. The intervention proposes a model for a building that is a “museum of itself”, a lively and flexible narrative mechanism capable of exposing its own history, not only maintaining the pre-existing structures in every area but designing new and evocative spaces. Furthermore, the rediscovery of the architectural particularities of the complex means that it can become a didactic exhibition of its history to be returned to the community and the future generations as an inalienable heritage. The past has no beginning, no end and is always. It is only by questioning the past that we can search for those truths capable of reviving buildings in the present, rewriting their identity and preventing time from reducing them to “empty shells”.
“Il Castello” is a free, open and participatory project where anyone, with their needs and ideas is welcome. Despite being privately owned, the building is called upon to be a public service. The events and activities scheduled in our cultural agenda can be attended from all over the province, in particular from neighboring municipalities. The reconstruction and management processes are mainly based on the social and human capital of the project, as well as local involvement. Despite its isolated physical location, the community attracts new people, inspired to share their aspirations and skills. “Il Castello” has opened up the possibility of something new in a territory that has not experienced any kind of cultural, economic or demographic growth in recent generations. This means the ability to identify what the community needs and brainstorm creatively, collaboratively and constructively to bring about change. Due to the growing problem of rural depopulation, “Il Castello” offers new perspectives to cope with the lack of cultural, social and work opportunities, especially for young entrepreneurs. By creating a collaborative space, we are helping to find specific solutions to the challenges of the territory. The key to our process is to dream of the future of our territory together. We believe in cooperation, simplicity and permanence as a strong way of building commonplaces. Through an empirical methodology, we try to build a sustainable network open to alternative perspectives. The open and flexible character of the space favors cultural exchange. The flow of ideas mixes and can be integrated directly into a collaborative, shared and welcoming practice laboratory. The most fascinating challenge of the project is to believe that there is a way to do new things and create possibilities for them to become reality. We find creative solutions to our needs, basing our strategies on shared knowledge, civic participation and respect for the environment.
