Hit by the earthquake in 2012, the agricultural settlement was regenerated by organizing spaces in which to cultivate the sensory well-being of those who work there. Internal patios and long views draw a ‘Greenbelt factory’ in the search for adequate and spatially rich working conditions, for an empathy between the user and the spaces that welcome him. Two twin buildings are joined by an ‘agricultural gallery’ open to the collective experience, harmonizing the man’s action to the nature’s order.
Over there where the “paternal shores”, as described by Ludovico Ariosto, turn into fields that were once covered by water and that were turned into fields by the work of man, in the heart of the Emilian countryside, home of hemp cultivation, we were faced with the unusual task of rehabilitating a productive settlement damaged by the 2012 earthquake. And with that, all that makes its landscape such as vegetable gardens and interstitial gardens that create a relationship between its buildings and the landscape which is shaped by the changing of the seasons. The new settlement has been redesigned with the aim of mending the dialectical relationship between buildings and nature. The facades of the buildings give in their materiality into the idea of a diaphanous fence that reflects, incorporating it, the natural horizon: a “bucolic gallery”, cultivated, that slips between buildings or part of buildings and reaches the landscape, multiplying the perceived perceptions. The softness of nature, nature as something that is re-built, comes back in what is the simple, natural presence of local species – lavender, ivy, rosemary – which are in conversation with seasonal crops thus describing a logical and coherent “vegetable garden” which animates patios and paths. Once again, we can see in a tense and evocative way, the idea of secret and introspective places, designed for the double purpose of cultivation and pause, where nature is essential for growing cultivations and yet, at the same time, it becomes an artifice. The intervention, therefore, fits harmonically within the context with simple and measured interventions, reorganizing in a logical way the cultivations and revamping, without upsetting them, the typological, figurative and material characteristics of the vegetable gardens that belong to the rural settlements.
Please highlight how the project can be exemplary in this context
The new productive settlement was been redesigned with the intention of mending the dialectic and stringent relationship between man and nature. The intervention recognizes its ethical foundation in the conception of the natural space and its workplaces as factors underlying the ecological transition and the democratic education of civil society. Volume and surface were distrubuted according to a spatial articulation that intersperses the buildings with gardens, small courtyards and open-air galleries that relate to the surrounding landscape. The new volumes tend to reconstruct the marriage with the environment, contributing not only to the reorganization of spaces, but also to the sensory well-being of those who work there. The two twin buildings are articulated in the form of a ‘green factory’ that harmonizes the man’s action with the order of nature, seeking that dialogue between the settlement and the environment which in rural architecture took place with spontaneity and balance. The drains of the toilets are collected in special filter tanks cultivated with phyto-purifying plants, in turn fed with rainwater conveyed there from the roof of the buildings. The softness of a reconstructed nature returns in the simple alternation of native species that interact with seasonal crops, to describe a linear vegetable-garden that animates patios and paths. The arrangement of the green is of great importance. Nature will find its home in pylons and pergolas, compensating, at least in part, for the loss of a small portion of the countryside with the construction of an “artificial landscape” which resonates with the natural landscape. The sensitivity towards work spaces on a human scale (“villas” rather than “temples of work”) wants to be the foundation of a workshop of sustainable production in which the primary elements of Nature, like and perhaps even more than the artificial materials of construction, reconcile man with the semantics of work.
Please highlight how the project can be exemplary in this context
The new buildings have been reconfigured in order to rationalize the settlement matrix, with a view to improving their functionality and in pursuit of a more balanced relationship with the environment. Volumes have been redesigned according to a spatial configuration that renews the settlement characteristics of rural architecture, interspersing the buildings with cultivated gardens and internal courtyards. The new buildings tend to reconnect the entire quadrilateral: internal paths, cuts and visual telescopes (“long views”) contribute not only to the logistical and productive reorganization of the spaces, but also to the sensory well-being of those who work there. Starting from this principle, the project rejects the compactness of the completed block, proposing instead the seriality of industrial technologies. The complex is articulated along the new backbone of the open-air gallery, a ‘cultivated walkway’ in the form of a ‘green decumanus’ measured by the rhythmic warp of the crossing profiles between the two buildings. The fronts of the volumes dematerialize in the idea of a diaphanous enclosure that reflects, incorporating it, the natural horizon: a vegetable-garden is wedged between the buildings and looks at the landscape, multiplying its perceptive planes. The recontructed nature returns in the alternation of native species that coexist with seasonal crops, to describe a linear agricultural gallery that animates patios and paths. The theme of secret, introverted spaces, designed for cultivation and rest, in which nature is necessary for production practices and at the same time becomes its protagonist, returns in an evocative form. The relationship between the internal spaces and the external appurtenances of the settlement (vegetable gardens) is the search for functionally adequate and spatially rich living and working conditions, for an empathic relationship between man and the nature in which he lives and works.
Please highlight how the project can be exemplary in this context
The key objective of the intervention is not only to rebuild the functionality and spatial value of the settlement, but also the community spirit that has expressed it over time and which will be able to revive in the future. Accessibility and semantic inclusion are an ideological declaration even before a technical-normative requirement. The ‘Greenbelt factory’ is organized entirely on the groud floor, with no differences in height between internal spaces (warehouses and services) and cultivated external areas, in order to guarantee accessibility to any user group. In particular, in addition to welcoming farmers and consumers at zero km, the project promotes: a) educational workshops open to kindergartens and for professional training; b) meeting spaces between trade associations, users and entrepeneurs; c) common ‘didactic vegetable gardens’, opportunities for meeting and socializing for the whole community according to inclusion projects agreed with the social services of the local municipalities. The project incorporates and implements best practices of collective cultivation, in the belief that the care of the land is all the more sustainable the more open to the entire civil society. The ‘community gardens’ are easily recognizable and accessible from the parking areas. Courts and internal patios are designed to welcome the public in safe conditions, without interfering with the product maneuvering areas, located elsewhere. The same paths, double to facilitate the accompaniment of the elderly and disabled, are paved with linear strips of pebbles, designed to give a guide to the visually impaired, like the folds in shaped sheet metal at the foot of the perimeter of the buildings. Ultimately, the collective experience is interpreted as a key to raise awareness and bring the community closer to the care of the territory, a real civil mission to implement the delicate balance of the environmental ecosystem, in the spirit of placing man in relationship to nature.
Please highlight how this approach can be exemplary
“Empathy is a complex form of psychological inference in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others” (Ickes, 1997). Experience caused by the psysical environment can lead to an alteration in the production of brain neurotransmitter through natural stimulation. While one is a substance that triggers allows for the body to naturally “engineer” this euphoric feeling “through exposure of images and activities that stimulate a strong emotional response”. Research conducted by environmental psychologists have aided in the delineation of 3 main principles of stress reduction. Social support, control, and the integration of nature into the design. By putting the focus on the experience of the man, architects are able to decrease their stress levels. This decrease in stress allows the body’s immune system to feel a sense of euphoria due to the dopamine encrease. Triggering the emotional centers, nerve chemicals and hormones are released that alter how the immune cells fight disease. This project integrates nature to architecture in order to llchievi a healing effect. The site and material were both crucial in llchieving this tranquil effect. Thsi design strives to connect architecture with the site as well as create relaxing effects through the interplay of dark vs light, open vs closed spaces. The flowing circulation allows one to move from exterior space to the inside with ease. The purpose of this project is to depict a clear and exemplary case of neuroscience application, as well as to demonstrate the practical and empirical aspects of the tools of this science in the field of architecture. A better understanding of neurological architecture may increase our knowledge of the basic concepts related to human and environment. Our project aims to combine the three dimensions of environmental sustainability, quality of experience and social inclusion creating a space of great human empathy.
The project is harmoniously re-positioned in the context through simple and measured interventions, rationally reorganizing the productive functions and renewing the typological, figurative and material characteristics of the rural settlement. The elementary settlement is engraved on the median axis by a visual telescope towards the countryside, a vegetable garden that defines the crossing paths and the configuration of the internal courtyards, cultivated and animated by native plants. Sercret gardens that rediscover the resonance and charm of the introverted spaces of medieval cloisters and hortus conclusus. A cultivated void punctuated by metal frames, which to the mere funcion of structural connections between the twin buildings associate the modern figure of the ancient pergolas of the past. The discreet hanging pergolas facing the existing courtyard, inhabitated by the vine, echo the measured sequence of the pylons of the median gallery. Flowered pergolas that anticipate rear gardens, describing shaded and paved green ‘open-air rooms’. The intervention recomposes the plot of the primitive layout planimetrically, while volumetrically rejects the compactness of the block, proposing instead the seriality of industrial production technologies. The position of the new buildings is regenerated by the guidelines of the archaic core of the court; two coupled constructions redefine the overall settlement, giving life to a cultivated median promenade. This is an aerial pergola whose construction elements measured the passage of time in the form of sundials, given the north-south orientation of the gallery. According to the conditions and the incidence of light, the diaphanous facades incorporate the natural landscape, doubling its rural horizon; the skin of the buildings is thus tattooed with a reflected landscape and dematerializes the corporeality of the volumes, harmonizing their insertion into the natural environment.
Please also explain the benefits that derived from their involvement.
How to rebuild the physical and semantic identity of a productive settlement hit by a natural disaster, synthesis of the values of a territory, in a perspective of social and multicultural inclusion? The key objective of the intervention is not only to recover the functionality and spatial value of the building, but also the community spirit that has expressed it over time and which, potentially, will be able to revive in the future. How and why? A participatory process has therefore activated that involved Administrations and productive activities, according to an inclusive governance model, at the end of which it was concluded that the most effective way to rehabilitate the social asset was not just to recover the damaged building, but mainly to rebuild the synergistic and collaborative spirit of entrepreneurs who cultivate and care for the environment, trade associations and consumers, increasingly oriented towards a qualitative and not quantitative dimension of production. Moreover, the community has involved not only as a beneficiary of the regenerative process, but in its ability to interact with Institutions in revitalizing the context. In short, the rehabilitation of the 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. The settlement wants to be an agicultural workplace open to the public, a collective organism inserted in a rural and social ecosystem connected to the territory and services. The system is conceived as coworking, a collaborative work model in which owners and users synergistically partecipate in the planning of activities, the owners agree to operate in a community where private activities, each maintaining their own privacy, are enriched by common areas such as vegetable gardens and collective rooms; the result is a building-factory theater of inclusive experience.
We believe that the human environment must address the role of the sense.
People need physical contact with nature and the outdoors, they need to feel the breeze, see water and moving clouds, even people have an innate sense of the horizontal. The project aims to respond to many of these concerns, interpreting the concept: “A place is not only a place: it is a sensorium”. We consider architecture as an art of “applied biology”. Quite simply, moods, efficiency, and health are intimately related to our environment. The project wants to investigate “this fascinating biological repertoire of human needs”. Rather, one needs to be equipped for the future by the designer as the professional “mid-wihe”. One cannot understand human behavior without understanding his relationship on nature. “Humanity is not something “other” than nature, but one aspect of it”. As RJ Neutra writes in “Nature Near”. The universe of which we are part is a dynamic continuum. It extends from the most distant galactic systems into our atmosphere, biosphere, and terrestrial mantle, wafting even deeper into an energetic array of molecolar and subatomic events that configure all matter, motion, and mind. Our skin is a membrane, not a barricade, and these universal processes reach through it, looking into our innermost vitals. Rather than designing a place, we create ‘transitions’ between site and building. We always think about the importante human need for “soul anchorage” and for harnessing each site’s ‘genius loci’ in creating it. Because humanity is not in opposition to nature but part of it, a building is not only a private area: it is part of the landscape, our heritage collective. The project building may be formally “pure” compositionally, but it is that partnership with its site, that “exultant dance od interconnectdeness”, that gives both the building and the site a richer meaning. The biorealistic design approach of the project aims to restore the bodily substrate of the human mental life.
Innovating by harmonizing the action of the man with the environment: a “Greenbelt factory” that incorporates nature into everyday living, two mirrored buildings divided by function but joined by a strip cultivated in the form of an internal garden. These principles of ancient construction, rooted in the Roman patio-house and still in the hortus inside the medieval houses, are translated by the project into a constructive system of modular elements with partial closure of a prefabricated grid. Standard and cheap construction materials complete the challenge towards new working models that bring man closer to Nature, exploring the sensorial relationships with his living environment. The project recognizes as its ethical and innovative foundations the conception of space and serial production as factors at the basis of technological progress and of a construction quality within everyone’s reach. The construction system adds the elements of the assembly into a measured list: panels, sheets, rain pipes, while the volumes redefine the settlement by rebuilding its primary geometries and directions. The intervention not only makes use of these prefabricated elements at the top of their expressive capacity, but also subordinates them to the articulation of spaces, weaving distributions schemes based on maximun simplicity. The prefabrication of the entire system allowed the integral coordination of all constructions elements – structures and finishes – optimizing the production aspects and drastically reducing assembly times and costs. The construction system also made it possible to customize any detail component, from the corner fittings to the “hidden” joints, from the gutter channels to the integrated downspouts to the facade cladding. Moreover, standard and inexpensive components offset the higher costs for the simple but precious details of the patio and interior gallery, details which nevertheless retain the same simplicity as the standard components.
Please provide clear documentation, communication of methodology and principles in this context.
“Naturam semper recurret”. There is nothing easer for man than to dress in progress, and ther is nothing more difficult than to strip off Nature. As the theater of our daily operational life, the workplace is an opportunity to reconcile man with dignity of doing and the semantics of existence. Their configuration enables function with technique and ennobles it with nature. How to re-enact nature in our daily operational life? How to reinsert new structures in a landscape that through minimal signs tells the centuries-old battles between man and nature? A landscape less and less spontaneous and more and more planned by an intensive productive economy. Once these small agricultural settlements in the form of courts launched their coquering aspirations in the hinterland, in an attempt to make arable land emerged from a landscape ruled by water. Today, the reconstructed settlement wants to recover and restore even a small slice of the landscape to the community that lives and works there, harmonizing human activity with natural balance. Spaces, geometries and shapes are conceived and modeled according to an ethics attentive to the real aims of the project as a tool to investigate, researh, and refine the space of man in its interrelations with the natural and built environment. That hydraulic revolution that over the centuries has restored habitable and arable land to man, today becomes a cultural revolution that allows civil society to regain possession of its own landscape and to rewrite its environmental and cultural balances. The architect, who works with the tools of perceptual stimulation, has the duty to consciously cultivate his job as a gardener of nervous and sensory development, since "domain of nature does not mean reckless perversion of its forms and processes, but rather the art of harmonizing the man’s action to the nature’s order” (R. J. Neutra, 1954).
“Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man that the sight of them contributes to his mental health, power and pleasure”. The purpose of the project is to apply recent findings in neuroscience that can be useful to architecture. Knowing the working patterns of the brain and how space affects cerebral functions con help architects design spaces that improve the user’s behavior, performance and well-being. The built environment has a direct impact on the human brain. Social relations, cognition, creativity, memory and well-being can be influenced by the surrounding space. Places can be designed in a way to improve cognition, learning and memorization; workplaces can improve performance, creativity and collaboration. All spaces of long occupation should be designed in a way to improve well-being. How can architecture change automatic behaviors and nudge people to behave in a healthier way? Can architects create places that improve socialization and happiness? These are some of the questions that are applied in this project. The psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) illustrates the role of the environment on individuals behavior, which means behavior is a function between the Person and the Environment. This projects aims to point some of the benefits that neuroarchitecture can bring to the users of workplaces. “We shape our buildings; therefore they shape us” (W. Churchil, “House of Commons Rebuilding”, 1943). It is possible to see more clearly the man’s reaction to each stimulus received by the environment and to understand in details how behavior is affected. “The design of a physical place influences the mental state of the people in that space. That shapes their attitutes and behavior” (S. Augustin, 2009). People nowdays usually spend 90% of their time inside buildings. Relationship between architecture and nature can reinforce cognition, memory, diminish stress and negative emotions, improving learning, inclusion, and well-being.
@MorenoPivetti, 2020
Content licensed to the European Union.