Tomas Ghisellini Architects at MoMA New York

Posted on mayo 1, 2013 by :: noticias arquitectura ::

Scheduled to be on view from July 10th to December 1st at MoMA New York, Tomas Ghisellini Architects will be presenting the international exhibition ‘Cut’n’Paste’. With a recent project exposed, their exhibition is dedicated to design, composition and communication languages of contemporary architecture. For more information, please visit here.

Tomas Ghisellini Architects at MoMA New York originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 01 May 2013.

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Domus Vitae Winning Proposal / Tomas Ghisellini Architects

Posted on diciembre 5, 2012 by :: noticias arquitectura ::

Designed by Tomas Ghisellini Architects, the first prize winning proposal for the Domus Vitae, a new city morgue and social facilities complex, is aimed at being a new architectural presence with a continuous but porous body. The design includes balconies, porches, patios, terraces, overhangs and suspended volumes which capture, tame or magnify natural light. These features create spaces for which the atmospheric quality is supposed to be a decisive added value. More images and architects’ description after the break.

A large green area, included between scenes and architectural settings, regenerates the fascination of the wonderful Delizie (marvelous country houses with huge gardens) of the Este Family, reinterpreting one of the urban issues perhaps more intimately rooted into the mental image that people keep of their city. The border wall is carved and made literally transparent; passersby, on foot or by bicycle, intrigued by the opportunity to spy on the large green space from the outside, becoming part of the experience. The historic Ferrara walled garden, from a territory of separation and exclusion, evolves into a social space to meet, a collective and fluid urban carpet.

Flanked to one of the existing buildings along the southern edge, a plug-linear technology spine incorporates all the technical equipments and service functions necessary to the complex (deposits, storage spaces, technical boxes, toilets, plant rooms, vertical connections, service entrances) and the approach-gap conserved between old and new, illuminated by natural light raining from above, distributes the spaces reserved for the sole employees arousing the perceptive suggestion of a historic alley.

The existing southern building shows to the inner distributions its north elevation. It hosts functions of acceptance, observation, analysis and storage of corpses, as well as the administrative, management and support to the personnel whose recreational facilities are strategically positioned on the east, close to a small public space, accessible from the outside, reserved to a coffee and snack bar. This cafeteria will also refresh mourners and occasional visitors to the citadel. Here, moreover, residents will gather in the evenings to chat, have a coffee, or just relax silently on the gardens.

A large mineral outdoor patio embraces the old circular pit making it become the new composition’s center of gravity, and drawing here the most significant common meeting area for mourners on the outside. The ground floor hosts the reception and sets up the places for acceptance and movement, as well as ceremonial rooms used in the preparation of remains. Around the double-height foyer, facing the patio and the historic city defensive walls to the east, stairs and lifters blocks allow vertical displacements from the basement straight up to the highest nobel level without visitors and staff never come into contact.

Spaces for the wake, away from the hermetic character of the Western tradition, yet perfectly protected from any introspection are here conceived as rooms of light: an entire wall of glass opens the interior to beautiful sky-opened two levels secret patios with hanging gardens, flowers and tree species. The intimacy of each of these five emotional environments offers visitors a somewhat “comforting” experience of pain. Each of the secret patios welcomes the work of a contemporary artist; the mortuary builds sites of affective sharing, spaces to live poetically thanks to the language of art.

An outside “path” in height, through the mineral patio, leads to a mysterious outdoor belvedere, otherwise unreachable, facing the garden and beyond the profile of the Renaissance city walls. This special meditative space is designed for individual isolation and contemplation. Suspended just opposite to the transparent main front and facing the rising sun, the architectural body surrounds the courtyard, floating on air, embracing the visitors.

The old circular pre-existing pit is a great place to house a sacred tree, a universal symbol of life and rebirth in all cultural and religious beliefs. So the Citadel will celebrate death not as an interruption, but as a simple transformation of life. Thus, for this reason it will be called Domus Vitae, home for life.

Architects: Tomas Ghisellini Architects
Location: Ferrara, Italy
Structures: Beatrice Bergamini
Plants and Fire Safety: Nicola Gallini
Sustainability and LEED® Evaluation: Violeta Archer
Collaborators: Michele Marchi, Alice Marzola
Client: Ferrara Municipality
Program: New city morgue and social facilities complex
Two-Phases Competition: May – November 2012 / First Prize
Project: 2013-2014
Building Construction: 2014-2016
Total Cost: 3,700,000 €

Domus Vitae Winning Proposal / Tomas Ghisellini Architects originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 05 Dec 2012.

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The Secret Garden / Tomas Ghisellini Architects

Posted on septiembre 19, 2012 by :: noticias arquitectura ::

Architects: Tomas Ghisellini Architects
Location: Tavazzano con Villavesco (Lodi), Italy
Project Year: 2012
Photographs: Courtesy of Tomas Ghisellini Architects

Project Area: 1,175 sqm
Structures: Beatrice Bergamini
Technological Systems: Nicola Gallini
Landscaping: Tomas Ghisellini
Collaborators: Cristina Haumann, Michele Marchi, Alice Marzola
Client: Municipality of Tavazzano con Villavesco

The expansion of the cemetery in Tavazzano con Villavesco experiences a new relationship between the city of the living and the places of the dead, creating a novel and interesting link between landscape and funerary architecture. The project actively builds the atmosphere of a park-cemetery, where all the individualistic exaggerations, typically connected to traditional Latin models, are replaced by a widespread, gentle, someway “domestic” monumentality.

As an alternative to the traditional densified urban cemetery, the proposal draws an intense green space, a place of scarcity, a kind of precious garden where plant species dispense colors and scents throughout the year. Here, the project develops an unconventional image of graveyard, a bright, clear, mild and suspended space. Lightness is proper, first of all, to the limit. Completely reversing the traditional typological settlements based on a dense and unbroken building construction along the edge of the fence, the border, threshold of demarcation between sacred ground and rural scenario abandons any mass opacity to become a pervious diaphragm, not to people but to natural elements. A three meters high wall made of exposed brick is for its 70% cut by a tunnel-pattern citing the pure and essential language of Lodi rural constructions and giving to the limit an unusual transparency. The wall, just like a lace, is crossed by light and breezes; the eye of the visitor is free to cross the border, to get lost in the expanse of fields and to savor the beauty of horizon.

Enclosed within this new porous fence, the buildings of the historic cemetery and the constructions of former enlargements, the space of the new intervention is designed as if it were a large sculpture garden. The architectural bodies, simple and rigorous, are made not to distract, not to diminish the individual reflection and meditation. They derive their beauty from having nothing superfluous and seem to simply lean on the green fields without engraving them.

The buildings, freely arranged according to an elementary compositional scheme, move away from the border and are disposed by a mutual slippage used as a space allocation expedient. The garden, divided by long parallel architectural scenes, holds a perceptually complex scenario, interesting, changing, always different at each step. The three buildings, just as the border wall, push their design vocabulary to the terms of an apparent immateriality: an uninterrupted porch, defined by a giant order of slender pillars over five meters high, prepares a charming covered space where the volumes for the accommodation of niches lay just as moving fragments. The stereometric architectural blocks host at their ends the fountains for water supply and the technical rooms for cleaning and maintenance tools storage.

A different character is shown instead by the five family chapels; these ones, in the recovery of the former south side, approach the backs of the votive constructions already settled along the north-west margin of the historic cemetery. These brand new prismatic volumes, entirely clad in natural travertine, take an apparent monolithic substance.

Only two openings are placed along the perimeter walls: the entrance to the prayer room, framed by a metal portal that draws in the stone surface a kind of symbolic passage, and a big holing, driven up by an impressive one-pitch highly inclined roof, launches in search of the atmosphere. The small independent buildings open their windows straight to the sky, looking east, capturing the gentle sun in the morning and shaping a full of light, vibrant and intensely emotional space.

The placement of the buildings and the interaction of the architectural bodies with the porous border define a variety of interesting spaces-in-between, enclosed and intimate rooms where visitors can choose to deepen their meditation or just relax for a few minutes sitting on a stone bench. The green carpet, where thin cypress trees are planted in really dense masses designing not permanent vegetal “chapels”, is divided into five color gardens, each of them characterized by the color of trees and shrubs that live there. From the west, the light blue, the white, the pink, the red and the yellow garden are put together in a fascinating micro-landscapes series.

Hardy plant species, all native or naturalized, are specially selected to ensure the cemetery the color of at least one flowering for each month of the year and to minimize the load on maintenance. Only one tree species has deciduous leaves while the rest keep evergreen foliage, the chosen shrubs are commonly considered as belonging to the most resistant and easily adaptable species as well as longer and constant annual flowering.

The footpaths that branch off from the two existing entrances are protected by a continuous canopy designed to produce on the whole a minimal visual impact. The coverage, completely independent from the architectural bodies of the buildings, derives from these an extreme formal rigor and simplicity of composition. The result is a system made of thin vertical elements supporting a light horizontal plane that draws a continuous covered walkway wide enough to repair the funeral processions. The positioning of the supports along an only side allows cover to maintain a complete opening towards the gardens. A protected path hugs the municipal chapel setting up in its immediate vicinity a gathering space usable to attend liturgical celebrations even in case of bad weather. The association of shelters and arcaded buildings generates a continuous “loop” of protected trails that allow visitors to experience the cemetery even in case of adverse weather conditions.