La Faggeta | Brallo_

(…) The project stems from the desire to integrate into the context of the Brallo natural park in a mimetic and minimally disruptive manner... Unlike traditionally enclosed architecture, the proposed intervention should in fact be interpreted as open, site-specific landscape architecture, which defines itself as an integrated system of elements (or services) scattered across the territory according to a predetermined order; as a relational space whose connective tissue is made up of the natural elements of the park itself: its beech trees, its streams of water and its pathways covered in leaves. It is in this sense that the distributive spaces themselves coincide with the exterior, the woodland, defining themselves as a system of voids that is extremely flexible to the varied demands of flows, while simultaneously allowing maximum optimisation of the built elements. The woodland ultimately enters into a "light" architecture, characterised by elements that, resting upon it, upon the existing ground — presupposing the minimum necessary excavations — serve, in the most flexible manner, to complement it and, at the same time, to describe it in its complexity. For these reasons and in response to the complex "nature" of the place, it was decided to adopt a partially organic matrix-based design system. Partially, because it nonetheless refers to a linguistic system characteristic of contemporaneity: the digital notational system. It is in fact starting from its constitutive element, the pixel, that a specific modularity was adopted, capable of re-coding the territory. Like an image that suddenly changes resolution, the architectural elements thus translate the conformation of the territory in a precise and "grainy" manner: (narrating) its contour lines. The requirements of economy and the impracticability of most of the intervention areas then dictated the need to move towards prefabrication models that would allow rapid on-site assembly of self-supporting structures, either finished or partially finished. In this sense, the dimensions of the constitutive motif of the grid, the pixel, were made to coincide with those of a container, easily transportable and assemblable on two levels: horizontal and vertical. The grid dictated by the container module was then aligned with the main connecting axis between the reception and "bivouac" areas and extended to the entire surroundings. In this sense, priority was given to greater south-facing exposure of the architectural elements, always having two sides exposed. Subsequently, an attempt was made to give the architectural elements themselves both a mimetic and a signage/orientating function, given the extremely homogeneous character of the place and the not unlikely possibility of getting lost within it. A "natural" motif, or pattern, referencing the existing beech trees, was in fact adopted as a recognisable — as artificial — element of camouflaging decoration, as a double-skin cladding of these prefabricated elements, thus capable of redefining their appearance both in qualitative terms, in terms of "eco-sustainability", and in terms of signage, being arranged so as to always orient in the direction of the aforementioned reception-bivouac axis.