Campus USI/SUPSI Lugano, Swiss
The building tends to disappear into the landscape becoming one with it, in a logic of dissolution. Thus, rather than imposing itself as a volume that occupies a space, architecture forms a spatial void, in a process in which volume tends to disappear and become a background.
Architecture, in this way, seems to identify with its own “scaffolding” to qualify as a fragment of landscape: a landscape obtained through an artificialization, through a sort of absorption of hidden laws and here only evoked. It’s an architecture that you can’t see from afar, that you don’t perceive in its entirety but reveals itself slowly discovering itself when you approach.
On the other hand, the landscape profile, the horizon, the skyline, enter architecture as active elements, since the project is no longer considered as an entity that imposes itself in a preponderant way but becomes a fragment of a wider process that reassures because it involves the relations between the parties.
It explores the hybrid territory between the arena complex and the site, in an attempt to transcend the traditional figure-ground opposition, the passive site and the active building. The concept of neutral terrain gives way to the manipulated landscape strategy as structure and terrain become “interchangeable”.
Starting from this concept we have intervened with an architectural solution that, making force on the morphological and territorial values, inserts the complex in a landscape system strongly integrated with the original environment of the plain of Lamezia and its natural badlands.
The building is embedded in the ground and creates a real continuity with the surrounding landscape. The roof, a system of “green ribbons” at several levels that accompany in a uniform way the different heights of the building, becomes a real roof garden, a large park where nature and artificial play a game of exchange, they integrate until they overlap and dilute each other. The building can be defined as “landscape building”. The interior, unlike the traditional concept of this type of building, opens to the outside, the landscape enters and merges with the terraces and the playing field. The access of the spectators and their outflow are facilitated by the lack of any barrier and obstacle, at the different levels of the terraces you can naturally reach by walking along the external paths that connect the parking lots with the park.
Credits: Design Architects: Tstudio | Urban Planning: R.Pavia | Structural Engineers: Eutecne | Mep Engineers: Ingegneria D’impianti | Sustainability: F.M. Federici | Feasibility: A. Scalise
Published in: (2012-2015) G. Salimei T-Studio City Landscape, Ilios, Bari. dal 01-01-2010 al 01-01-2010