-
Architects: NAUTA Architecture & Research
- Area: 185 m²
- Year: 2012
-
Photographs:Roberto Micoccio
Text description provided by the architects. This two family house presents a traditional local row house scheme, 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.
The ground floor rooms presented existing vaulted ceilings, very valuable for their architecture and space effect. This scheme imposed the preservation of the enfilade of vaulted spaces, yet needing 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 external or ‘internal windows’, in order to merge entire rooms. The final effect contributes to lighten the masonry, offering many interconnected perspectives that ultimately make the spaces breath, lightened by lots of natural light. The masonry becomes light like paper, cut by generous voids.
The palette of materials is reduced to the essential: masonry and stucco for the walls; ‘coccio pesto’, a local mix of hydraulic mortar and terracotta grit, used for the floors and poured on site; travertine for the other surfaces. This stone is applied either in its natural state or treated with a transparent resin, capable to preserve its visual irregularity.
The final effect wills to recreate a rustic, thrifty, somehow austere atmosphere, achieved by using innovative applications for traditional materials.
