Villa on the hills - Revigliasco (TO)

Year 2014

Project: UdA with Maby Picco

Design Team: Andrea Marcante, Valter Camagna with Maby Picco
Contributors: Marco Luciano, Luca Malavolta, Corrado Curti, Emanuele Franco

Technical data:
Detached house consisting of n. 2 units for a total of 300 sq.m. on two levels. Structure in iron and reinforced concrete with septums and pillars. Vertical brick and glass embankments with printed adhesive films. External cladding with ventilated façade made of multilayer phenolic panels with a synthetic grass covering, glued to the surface.

Situation:
A rectangular plot of hilly terrain with a steep, south-oriented slope. The site, located in an elevated position on the edge of a wooded area, dominates the plain and the underlying landscape, made up by a mosaic of agricultural crops and inhabited centres. The property can be reached via two roads that run along the lower and upper boundary.

Theme:
The building and the interaction with the landscape. Architecture as a means to interact with a place and reveal its characteristics. The insertion of a foreign element: the new construction, in an existing context, becomes a tessellation operation.

Project:
The new building, although made up of two units, is conceived as a single body that lies on the slope and reaches out to the plain below. It was placed in the upper part of the lot, hence privileging access from the top through the upper road. The building’s feature lays within its interaction with the landscape: as an element of contamination and manipulation of the surrounding reality through shape and external surfaces; as an organization of interior spaces through a total visual and spatial permeability along the longitudinal axis down the slope.

Hence the development of a mimetic architecture, perceivable through deeply different visual angles. It is the relationship between artifice and nature, each new building is an adaptation of the place’s potential. Each new architecture overlaps the existing one and modifies its characteristics. The artificiality of the new construction is expressed through a mimetic form; and dominating is the approach to the house from the outside featuring its access from above; the flat roof that becomes the only element visible from the road which dominates and redefines the landscape below with its horizon line. However, this geometry that seems to impose itself on reality is rather contaminated and takes on itself, on its own skin, the surrounding elements of uncertainty and changeability.

Reality is a texture, the external cladding of the building becomes a mosaic, an abstract and at the same time a familiar weave: the weave of the work of man who has transformed the landscape’s nature. Inside, the spaces are arranged and organized based on the relationship between man and the immediately surrounding environment, between the house and the land where it lies.