The building consists in a detached house located in the outskirts of Treviso, 30 km from the Venice lagoon. The usable floor area is 185 sqm per unit. Two parking covered places per unit were required by the administration althought it was clearly demonstrated that they weren’t necessary.
The primary goal was to build a low energy consumption house that could represent an iconic building for the small town thanks to the sustainable and design values.
The project consists in the construction of 19 Social Housing units in a plot located in the fringe of the urban fabric of ‘Sa Pobla’ (a small town in the Mediterranean island of Mallorca) From the beginning we understood that the elements to develop the project were the features that tell us about the climate, the context and the way people live in this area (the courtyards, the filters, the light and shadow, the ventilation, the configuration of the plots, the small scale of the buildings)
Designed and built in just five months because of the state of emergency generated by the earthquake in Abruzzo in 2009, this social building responds both to the priority needs of the Municipal Administration to build a low-cost anti-seismic construction, in the shortest time and to the willing of the designers to insist on high-quality architecture, integrating the building with the context (choosing the best orientation, shape and materials) and ensuring the least environmental impact.
The project of the Elisabeth and Helmut Uhl foundation has been realized thanks to a restricted international architectural competition held in 2009, which saw the participation of fifteen architectural teams from Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. The aim of the competition was to design a building able to host the activities of the homonymous cultural and research foundation.
The project is the synthesis of a variety of ideas studied and considered during many months of work. The result tries to combine sustainable technology and tradition, aesthetic and practical aspects, social context and individual requirements and it has been pursued through a constant research and a very close relationship with the client, which desidered since the beginning to get a passive house for his family.
The environmental strategy developed as part of our ongoing reflections about the nature of cities, and it had an early impact on the project, not so much because we needed to satisfy certain regulatory criteria, rather because we wanted to merge a desire for architecture with sustainability, with an eye to savings and to known or contingent uses.
Our proposal pays homage to Paris by employing an architecture that inserts itself into the city’s own logic, but which also responds to current and future challenges.
The building is located in the upper section of the oldest part of Ragusa where longitudinal streets are running parallel at different levels, following the natural slope of the land and tied together by a criss-cross of steps.
The current sequence of buildings is the result of combining or subdividing properties and sometimes even modifying the old connections between levels, which once tended to be divided between the ground floor production areas and the upper floor lodgings.
Seen from the outside, the Oficina Vidre Negre office block brings two images to mind: a stealth aircraft that has just touched down; alternatively, a meteorite or huge stone hewn to a diamond shape.
The canton grisons guideline was an extensive head technological redevelopment, that is to say the school buildings transformation from the sixties into the present, to keep the minergie standard in the future and to satisfy all the today’s instructions and norms.
As an unique example, the former teacher-training college presents itself as a built replacement of the post-war modernism in grisons.
There were no other houses in the neighborhood that would block insolation, since the site was located in the south western corner of a slightly inclined land. Therefore the house is exposed to abundant sunshine during the day. On the other hand, land and sea breeze blowing in the northwest contributes to a fine wind circulating condition.
