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Architects: C&P Architetti
- Area: 1340 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Alessandra Chemollo
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Lead Architects: C&P Architetti Luca Cuzzolin+Elena Pedrina
Text description provided by the architects. Dotted with cornflowers and poppies, the high embankment hides the building from the view of those arriving from the main road to the south; hidden by the grassy and flowery carpet, the spaces develop mainly inside it. It is the context, here, that dictates the conditions: a settlement situation very common in the Veneto plain and characterized by the mixture of houses and warehouses. Located on the built-up edge of a small town in the province of Venice (Fossalta di Piave), the lot is confronted with the presence of an industrial area and a low-density residential fabric, with a prevalence of single-family homes and patches of urban countryside punctuated by the presence of vines.
The high embankment reveals the desire to close the space with respect to the ordinariness of the nearby productive fabric, choosing introversion as the settlement principle. The retaining gabion of the embankment, destined to be progressively covered by the vine, as well as the flowering of the nascent third landscape that covers it, become elements of an architecture that contrasts the seriality of the productive fabric with the surprise of a changing ‘landscape in motion’.
The fulcrum of the internal spatiality is represented by the rectangular void of a large rectangular courtyard, protected from the road to the south by the embankment. This is the space around which the internal rooms of the building are organized. One side of the courtyard is delimited by the retaining wall made of gabion against the background of which three hackberry trees stand out. Together with the gabion, also offered to the progressive embrace of the vine, the trees collaborate to define a backdrop of naturalness that alienates and protects from the outside. The horizontality of the lawn is marked by the singular presence of an oak tree while transparencies towards the interiors draw the perimeter of the grassy surface: to the west are the windows of the workspaces that overlook here and, to the north, by the large windows of the volume entirely dedicated to the owner's car collection.
The courtyard thus not only reveals the organization of the spaces but also gives full evidence of the material nature of the building. Internally, if towards the road the side is designed by the vegetation, ready to conquer even the inert, on the other side the architectural language relies on the purity of the concrete and the metal used for the fixtures.
The interior is fluid and open, but with functionally well-defined environments, neatly placed along a distribution space that runs longitudinally along the volume. The offices face the access garden located to the west. The workstations follow one another separated by partitions that still leave the spaces communicating and maintain free circulation along the completely glazed side overlooking the garden. The interior deliberately maintains an industrial character, indicated by exposed ducts on the ceiling, alongside the lighting system, but also by the use of concrete, for the floors and for the partitions that mark the workstations.
The furnishing elements by Albini, Gio Ponti, and Scarpa, the plants, the works of art from the owner's private collection, to the colored curtains used to darken the meeting rooms, act as a counterpoint to the rough purity of the concrete. The steel kitchen is the last room placed to crown this volume: upon entering, the large window allows a view, beyond the hedge, of the vines of the neighboring lots, while on the left you access the outside, in a protected entrance hall used as an outdoor space for convivial occasions.
The driveway from the external embankment runs along the north side of the building where the entrance door to the car showroom is located, continuing instead, you arrive at the entrance hall of the kitchen and the sports area. The clean concrete wall marks the perimeter of the built volume on these two internal sides, climbing plants climb the perimeter walls as a prelude to a progressive covering by vegetation. It is in this wait that the architecture offers itself to time, lending itself to the moves of nature. From the outside, the perception of an alienating object remains, almost a hybrid infrastructure, the project's response to the need to find other ways to relate to the context.
