AVETRANA – ARCH EXERCISE I

Commissioned project.
REALISED
Program: Complete renovation of a two-family house, including garden design.
Total floor area: 350 sqm.
Budget: € 375.000.
Client: private.
Location: Avetrana (Taranto), Italy.
Design and realisation: 2009-2013.

This two-family house presents a traditional local scheme of ‘row house’; introvert on the street and open on the back garden. The central rooms, living and dining areas, suffered great lack of light, due to their distance from the two facades. All rooms on the ground floor present vaulted masonry ceilings, very valuable for their architecture and space effect.
The scheme imposes the preservation of the enfilade of vaulted spaces, yet it urges a strategy to avoid the box in box effect and extend multiple
internal flows and views. In order to achieve this effect of openness and space interconnection, we used the ‘arch’ archetype and applied it in a playful unconventional way. We opened several arches, different in size, either as ‘internal windows’ or to merge entire rooms into each other. The final effect contributes to lighten the masonry structure, offering many interconnected perspectives that ultimately make the spaces breath, lightened by lots of natural light. The masonry becomes lighter, like paper, cut by generous voids.
We reduced the palette of materials to very few ones: masonry and stucco for the walls; ‘coccio pesto’ for the floors, a local mix of hydraulic mortar and terracotta grit, poured on site; travertine for the other surfaces. Travertine is applied either inits natural state, or treated with a transparent resin, capable to preserve the visual irregularity of the stone. The final effect wills to recreate a sort of ‘rustic , thrifty, somehow austere’ atmosphere, achieved by using innovative applications for traditional materials.