San Salvatore by Bravo.Charlie.Mike.Hotel

San Salvatore Pierre d’Avoine Architects

For Claude

San Salvatore Pierre d’Avoine Architects Photographs by David Grandorge

Contents

From Fragmentation to Unity Perder Duelund Mortensen

San Salvatore, Montione, Umbria ‘Making Need Align With Desire’ Pierre d’Avoine

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Reflections: An Italian Job Kuo Jze Yi

132

Acknowledgements

Villa Lante, Bagnaia: ‘Table’ on the 3rd terrace with water flow for wine cooling

From Fragmentation to Unity

Perder Duelund Mortensen

San Salvatore in Montione is a particular building in a particular site, completed after extensive restructuring and renovation. Pierre d’Avoine Architects has been responsible for the project and its implementation.

is quite forward and high up on the lengthy edge of the highland, west of the Tiber valley where the river flows through the province of Umbria. In the Middle Ages, Montione included a castle, a small farm and sixty houses, now ruined. Only the church and the rectory remain, lonely below the castle hill hidden in forest. The terrain falls slowly but steadily across dilapidated olive groves and distant fields. From the chapel terrace to the east is a magnificent view across the valley.

The building consists of a little church and rectory for the former clergy; more than 600m2 in all, grown together into a dense and complex entirety, where its various parts can be read visually on the surfaces of the building. The plans from the time before restructuring are not easy to grasp, as is evident from the survey conducted by the architects. They reveal the difficulties met by the architects presented with an architectural assignment to organise a functional programme for everyday life, despite a limited number of rooms. The house is a result of additions and changes through several centuries, including deconsecration of the chapel twenty five years ago when the building was first used as summer residence. The chapel is the main space of the complex and the absolute spatial attraction, but the tight weaving into the building and crooked lines of movement are only understandable when considering the tight former everyday relationship between ecclesiastical rituals and the domestic. The clergy were always on duty and close to God regardless of working in the church, in the garden, the olive grove or in the village. The condition of building was defiantly poor, but also partly owing to the former owner’s apparently limited understanding of the task and lack of resources. The site has on the other hand a format and obvious possibilities for the conscious interpreter. The position

The architects consequently had to face a great challenge, but also obvious opportunities, when the client handed over the task. The approach has been firm but also gentle and pragmatic during the project; its evolution, including close discourse, with the client is reflected in the many drawings and models that were made. The interdisciplinary design development included collaboration with anthropologist Clare Melhuish, as well as artistic methods. The design acknowledges the arrangement of disparate rooms and components of the existing building. The deconsecrated chapel has been reconceived as the main domestic space, despite its segregation from the rest of the house. Among the other rooms the bigger, more generally usable rooms have been identified as fundamental in the composition of family spaces and sleeping quarters. Other minor rooms and niches have been added, giving individual character to the resulting spatial units. These include bathrooms and walk-in or built-in closets. Door and window niches are handled with great care, accentuating daylight and views. They are independent, small compositions of polished concrete window cills,

timber frames, glass and shutters. Some niches are furnished with desks and function as work places, adding a monastic air to the plain, ascetic architecture. The nonlinear series of spaces and sequences of movements are the result of careful structural adjustments. The family units appear like pearls on a string, equal and thus open for uses according to individual needs of a generation within a single, close family, or of several families, visiting the house for a while and each living in their own rhythm. The front door to the west provides entry in the middle of the string and winds in one direction, downward with the chapel and the common family room as keystone; or upward with the master bedroom and the tower as keystone. The two keystones are special artistic experiences. The master bedroom is in open relation to the attic with roof construction visible. A free standing monolithic volume in terrazzo is formed in the space with wash basin, table, bath tub and wardrobe ‘hollowed out’, as though from a mould. The former bell tower rises over a niche, with access by a ladder to distant views of the surrounding landscape through four glazed openings. The other keystone is the chapel and the common family room. The chapel is now integrated in the everyday life of the house with access by a narrow door in the ‘back wall’, which was originally the private entrance for the clergy. At the back of the space is an altar raised on a step. The dark interiority of the chapel, including the heavy timber entrance doors to the east elevation may be maintained when the occasion demands, or when the property is unoccupied. However a new large, glazed sliding door on the inner face of the east wall provides the potential of a view across the chapel terrace and of the Tiber valley throughout the year when the timber doors are open, even during cold, wet or windy weather. This device shifts the spatial mood of the chapel from an enclosing vaulted verticality, signifying cosmic immateriality, to a secular realm and an earthly horizon. The prosaic bigger family room is behind the chapel, accessed by a single door. Here in the former refectory is now a kitchen and breakfast room, in a big common space covered by rustic stable vaults, with fireplace and a new kitchen formed as an island in the room.

The architecture is conversing with the bath volume of the master bedroom upstairs. Exit from the common room is by a wide staircase up to the south-facing garden and a shaded outdoor eating place. A totally new element has been added to the composition. A pool and a pool house with a studio at the rear have found a place during the design process, on the north side of the church. The pool stretches out from the ground, apparently floating forward to the river valley and horizon with the sky mirrored in the surface of the water. The rooms on the other hand, are anchored to the ground, excavated to a level below the existing floor of the church; submitting to the church but accentuating the landscape form and mirroring the old building, like the black and white of a fool’s mask. The architecture and idea of the complex refer to hydraulic installations and mythological caves of Mannerist gardens. Some of the best examples, such as Villa Lante 1, are found in nearby Bagnaia. The elements are expressive, like the historical examples, and seem to gush out from the ground. But the entire composition is free, not axial or symmetrical, opening diagonally as seen in Japanese villa and garden architecture developed in relation to the tea ceremony and the teahouse. The pool complex emphasises the open and unfinished architectural understanding of the work and adds, like the Japanese teahouse 2, its own life and architectural vocabulary to the entire vacation atmosphere and the site; time and weightlessness, a tie to traditions and bodily touch with the elements, earth and water.

Peder Duelund Mortensen, Architect MAA and Associate Professor Emeritus in Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen

Villa Lante, Bagnaia, architect Pirro Ligorio, hydraulic engineer Thomasso Ghinucci, c. 1570. Mannerism, a style in fine arts and architecture dating from the early 1520s in Italy, developed in parallel to the Late Renaissance; incorporating garden architecture elements of disturbance and uncertainty, such as mechanical elements like fountains activated by the garden owner to entertain guests; also seen in iconographic gardens referring to classic mythology and literature, intended to express the philosophic ideas of the owner. Examples are Villa d’Este in Tivoli and Sacro Bosco, Villa Orsini in Bomarzo. Ref: Gyldendal, Den store danske 2014

Sukiya style, i.e. in Villa Katsura and garden in Kyoto, c. 1620, was regarded from a European perspective as synonymous with the Japanese garden and one of the sources of Western modernism. Ref: Itoh and Futagawa, The elegant Japanese House 1969

San Salvatore, Montione, Umbria ‘Making Need Align With Desire’

A project by Pierre d’Avoine Architects (Pierre d’Avoine, Jze Yi Kuo, Mo Wong)

‘Architecture cannot avoid creating composition out of chaos … fragmentation always carries the promise of constructing a new unity’ 1 Mary McLeod, Order in the Details, Tumult in the Whole

CUMBERLAND MANSIONS An academic friend, an anthropologist and architect, recommended us to our Anglo-Italian client for whom we designed a top floor flat in a mansion block in Marylebone in 2005-7. 2 The dialogue with the client was very important and the project was carefully tuned to suit their exacting requirements, which included working with Italian tradesmen to install elements of the fit-out, which we designed and were manufactured in Italy. These included lacquered sliding screens, terrazzo basins and kitchen worktops. We also designed a terrazzo bath, which was built in-situ because one prefabricated to that size would be too big to transport to site and too heavy and unwieldy to carry up ten flights of stairs. We used a spare palette of finishes – fumed oak flooring, white painted walls, pale marble plastered ceilings – within an interior that had been reorganised to align openings axially along and across the central hall, to create extended diagonal vistas within the flat and to views to the east including the BT Tower.

SAN SALVATORE: FIRST ENCOUNTER The client bought San Salvatore in autumn 2008 to use as a summer residence, and we visited it together in late December for the first time. Arriving in Rome during a blizzard, we drove north to Umbria along the Tiber valley before turning up into the hills to the west past Todi. The landscape, although naturally beautiful, has been developed piecemeal along the highway and

is now experienced as a scrappy mix of small towns and villages, with industrial buildings and suburban villas strung out along their edges. Farming is smallscale and mainly arable. The valley is wide and the river hardly visible. San Salvatore is located at the eastern edge of the Umbrian mountains, on a promontory overlooking the Tiber valley. The land rises gradually to 345m above sea level. The bell tower of San Salvatore is glimpsed through trees – the upper part an open red brick arched structure capped with a rendered dome and cross. The road, now gravel, winds through vineyards and olive groves. The building appears behind a steep, densely wooded hillock – we later found out it was the site of a castle and discovered stone ruins marking the keep. It had continued snowing en route, and by the time we arrived the weather had closed in and visibility was poor. From the roadside, the west elevation of San Salvatore is a flat-fronted two-storey building with stone steps leading up to the entrance door. It is all that is left of Montione, at one time a settlement of three hundred people and one of many fortified hilltop towns and villages in the locality. As a building San Salvatore consists of three disparate elements compacted together – L-shaped residential block, chapel, and bell tower. Todi is the largest local town. In the early 1990s it was proposed as a model sustainable city, because of its scale and its ability to reinvent itself over time. The domed Renaissance church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, sometimes attributed to Bramante, is located on the flank of the city hill, just outside the

walls. However it is Todi’s medieval public realm that excites the imagination. Edmund Bacon, in Design of Cities, states, “In Todi there is great clarity to the form of the total city, and, as in Athens, it is easy to visualise the sequence of space experiences as one moves from the gate to the square.” 3 It has an evident history of building over centuries that has been stripped away from Montione, leaving San Salvatore the only survivor. Fratta Todina, which has a much smaller population, is nearer and less scenic. It too has extensive stone ramparts that appear to grow out of the landscape. San Salvatore was owned by the Conti Faina family and is situated within the Collelungo estate which includes olive and walnut cultivation, vineyards and a large area of woodland extending over 415 hectares. The chapel was deconsecrated some years ago. The previous owners, a German couple had lived in it as a summer home and altered it, without obvious care, to suit their seasonal occupation. The chapel faces east over the valley across a small terrace. This view, limited by the snowstorm on our first visit, is beautiful without being too precious. On clear days one can see Marsciano, a town seven kilometres away in the valley, its industrial silhouette a hazy reminder of the real world. The land falls awxay steeply on three sides and is heavily wooded to the south and west. The wider estate has a neglected olive grove and is a ruined agricultural landscape covering several hectares. The castle mound planted with cypress trees overshadows the entrance front to the west. The topography is key to understanding the proposal. The hillside road winds through a landscape of small farms and holiday homesteads. San Salvatore is concealed in woodland and its spectacular location could only be understood once one had parked and engaged the site on foot. The design has evolved as an understanding of the building and its relationship with its wider site, to access and to views from afar and in close-up, to front and back. On arrival at the south west entrance gate to the site, the panoramic view of the landscape to the north east is blocked by the building mass, and is only revealed after walking around it to the chapel terrace through the kitchen garden to the south or via the formal garden to the north.

CHAPEL AND HOUSE The chapel, although deconsecrated, retains a sombre elemental presence that resists domestication and inhibits circulation. The adjacent cellular rooms and passages had been much altered and lacked clarity. The chapel in contrast seemed almost unchanged. It is barrel vaulted and symmetrical along its east-west axis. It is completely wrapped on the west side and partly on its south side by residential building. Thus the windows to the domestic spaces are mainly on the west and south elevations. The chapel still had an altar and dias, and a three quarters size religious statue in a niche at upper level. The south west corner of the chapel connects the kitchen and bell tower with the rest of the domestic accommodation. One hesitates to call it a house, it has an ambiguity that is unsettling and not entirely comfortable. The residential interior had a traditional floor structure of dark timber beams, smaller square joists and cotto floors, all in very in bad repair. The walls were rough-plastered. The previous owners had added an aluminium conservatory to the south elevation at first floor over the entrance to the old cantina which housed the oil tank. The bell tower was open to the elements and occupied by pigeons. Parts of the building date from the 14th century and possibly earlier. It had been altered extensively and much of the older building work covered up or obliterated. Externally the building had been poorly maintained. Stone and rubble walls originally rendered had been patched with exposed terracotta blockwork and the main east elevation to the chapel smooth-rendered and painted a harsh gloss white. The bell tower dominated. The immediate site was overgrown, with broken stone ramparts protruding from the sloping ground to the north east. The client understood the scope of the project was very different to their London flat. San Salvatore at over 600m2 is nearly four times larger. The brief was to make a ‘humble’ project, in response to the rustic setting, reorganise the interior to include five bedroom suites retaining the chapel as the main gathering space and also make a new pool, pool room and terrace within the site. The wider landscape design was to be considered at a later stage. We worked with the local geometra to obtain official approval for the proposals, and with a local contractor used to working on country houses with a less demanding brief.

The whole of the existing structure had to be stabilised. The cotto floors were used as formwork for thin reinforced concrete screeds that tied existing walls together. The floors are finished with Pietra Serena stone tiles and the ceiling joists lined in plaster between the larger timber beams. These two decisions simplified the interior surfaces and made the spaces less visually busy. Much work went into adjusting and clarifying the interior spaces to provide five bedrooms with en suite bathrooms. The open bell tower was glazed in at the top and four new floors inserted to provide a WC and log store at ground floor, a study to the adjacent bedroom on the middle floor and a study off the main bedroom on the upper floor, with permanent steel ladder access to the newly decked and enclosed bell chamber from which to enjoy the views of the surrounding landscape. In the refurbishment of the chapel, the altar and dias have been left intact and no attempt has been made to furnish the interior. Glazed sliding doors have been added to the east wall, so that the view over the valley is available even in cold weather if the original wooden doors are opened. No attempt is made to create easy circulation through the building. In the project, the chapel is understood as a void space. It could even be reconsecrated and used for private worship in the tradition of larger country houses in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. The chapel roof had to be rebuilt and the existing plaster vault reformed on a new timber structure. The conservatory was removed from the south elevation and a lean-to structure demolished on the north side, otherwise the exterior form of the building was hardly altered. Four new windows were made including one in the dining room at lower level, another in the entrance elevation to provide daylight to the new bathroom on the middle floor, and two in the bell tower. The elevations were retained, the blockwork faced with lime render and the chapel front was completely resurfaced to match. The new windows were formed using precast concrete surrounds and all windows provided with polished concrete cills cast in stainless steel moulds. Where possible the existing chestnut timber windows and shutters were retained and new patinated steel shutters designed to match new windows and those that needed replacement. The cantina was converted into the kitchen and provided with a new south-facing

entrance and canopy. The latter provides a balcony to the bedroom above. The only other new opening consisted of a concrete framed doorway and balcony in the north west corner bedroom at second floor, to provide a view over the valley to the east. Terrazzo linings and fittings were used for all bathrooms. A small terrazzo aedicule, containing bath, basin top and wardrobe to the master bedroom, was designed to provide a modest three-dimensional flourish to the planar restraint of the rest of the interior. Despite the limited palette of materials and finishes, the ambition was not to homogenise the ad-hoc nature of the existing building(s), but to provide a sense of order by making a few critical adjustments. Work on the project was slow and the 21 month building contract period extended to over five years. The contractor, in a way that seems to be the norm for local builders, took time away to hunt wild boar and attend to other projects. This, as well as the traditional monthlong holiday in August contributed to the leisurely pace of the construction work. Temperatures in the Umbrian mountains are extreme and in summer can rise to over 40 degrees Celsius. Winters are harsh, and the freezing weather restricted outdoor working for long periods while also reducing the time available for work on the exterior fabric and new building elements.

POOL, POOL ROOM AND TERRACE The design of the pool, pool room and terrace accentuates with the diagonal movement across the site from the south west entrance to the vista over the valley to the north east. The composition of the pool, pool room and terrace designed as a low horizontal element, visually supports the chapel front from the north east and balances the bell tower to the south east. In the design, the ensemble has been conceived as a rusticated base to the chapel front and the rest of the building, and links the stone chapel terrace and the rampart ruin. The design includes a minor staircase adjacent to the chapel terrace and a major staircase between pool room and rampart. The latter staircase connects the upper north side garden descending into the pool itself – suggesting archaic ritual as well as leisurely past time.

The composition as a whole may be understood from the adjacent hilltop to the north, and also immediately downslope from the north east where the landscape is more open, as the hillside to the south east is wooded and the chapel barely seen. Only the bell tower is visible from this side. The principal elevation of the chapel can only really be appreciated from the east and north east. The pool room parapet wall, when approached from the north west, is a low upstand forming a datum to the view of the Tiber Valley to the north east at the same level as the existing chapel terrace wall. The use of board-marked concrete for the pool room contributes a new rough element to the other materials used in the building – rubble stone walls and lime render to the chapel and rest of the building, and the florid Victorian red brickwork of the bell tower. The building as found had been repaired with unfinished terracotta blockwork. We also finished these in lime render but didn’t extend the treatment to the primary rubble stonework walls. The use of new concrete elements for the existing building is more refined. Smooth formwork is used for the new window openings and balconies, and stainless steel trays for casting the concrete cills. The pool and pool room were considered in a number of locations before it was decided to position them downslope and to the north east of the chapel forming an asymmetrical composition with the stone retaining wall to the chapel terrace, and the remnant of a rampart wall to the north. As mentioned, the pool room is conceived as a rusticated basement to San Salvatore and the chapel in particular. It is made using sawn, board-marked, in-situ concrete from local river aggregate. The pool projects from the hillside and was originally a cantilevered structure. However during the design process construction regulations were changed as a result of the Aquila earthquake in April 2009. The pool and pool room structure had to be reconsidered, and the pool design adjusted. The design also evolved as a result of testing of sight lines and views from the pool terrace. In the final design the pool room appears to be carved into the land between two parallel flights of steps. The pool room included a store and basic kitchen, as well as a changing room. During the construction the client decided to convert the latter into a separate studio with its entrance cut into the north slope. The

pool room is dressed with canvas blinds at the start of summer and then boarded with removable timber shutters during the winter months when the pool has to be drained and occupation of San Salvatore is intermittent. The design of the pool, pool room and terrace aims for an elemental quality, to empathise with, support and extend the existing much-altered buildings that comprise San Salvatore, but also to participate in and evoke memories of the ruined landscape that includes the castle mound to the west. The pool terrace has been conceived as the corollary to the chapel interior, with its enclosing barrel vault forming a dark, still sacred void at the centre of the project. In contrast, the terrace designed with a similar footprint to the chapel is open to sky, and gestures expansively to the view and the heavens in pantheistic celebration. The project evolved in conversation with colleagues Jze Yi Kuo, Mo Wong and Andrew Houlton (Houlton Architects), and with an informed and sophisticated client who was completely immersed in the design process. San Salvatore exists, as all architectural projects, in various idealised versions on paper and as models at various scales and materials. It was exhibited at Land Architecture People, an exhibition by architects Pierre d’Avoine and Andrew Houlton and the anthropologist Clare Melhuish at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen in 2009 to inaugurate my guest professorship there, and in 2010 at Ambika P3 Gallery, London. The exhibition included an important ethnographic element – interviews carried out by Clare with our clients, including the San Salvatore client, were shown as unexpurgated texts together with portraits of clients, to acknowledge and also celebrate their voices within the collaborative process. During the first eighteen months of the construction, works Kuo Jze Yi lived firstly on site and later in Todi when the building was uninhabitable owing to the intensive operations on site. Many, perhaps too many, design drawings were made during a process of exploration that continued for over two and a half years. There came a point when we had to withdraw from site to leave the client in charge of the completion and fitting out. Ideas that could have taken the project further conceptually, in terms of spatial subtlety and material fitness, had to be set aside and could not be accommodated in the final building work.

THE ITALIAN VILLA TRADITION San Salvatore is now only a fragment of a larger settlement, its immediate setting in a landscape whose ruination has been overlaid, trodden-in and almost forgotten. There was not really the scope to reconsider it within the grand tradition of the Italian villa and redesign the landscape setting at a wider scale. Yet one is nevertheless aware of the history of the Italian Renaissance villa and its widespread influence. Van der Ree, Smienk and Steenbergen, in Italian Villas and Gardens, state that “In the garden the organization, conversion and perfection of nature took place according to prescribed rules, which brought about the integrazione scenica of the villa into the landscape and that the plan of the villa can be regarded as a rational scheme superimposed on the landscape in which those parts of the landscape covered by the scheme are ordered and intensified. The situational properties revealed by the projection of the geometrical scheme on the natural topography.” 4 At San Salvatore one looks for and forms relationships, however fanciful, between existing features in the landscape to make readings such as casino-parterre-bosco and nymphaeum-grotto-cascade-reflecting pool, and gains

inspiration from the great Mannerist villas gardens relatively close at hand, particularly Villa Farnese at Caprarola, Villa Giustiniani at Bassano Romano and Villa Lante near Lago di Vico in the Roman Campagna to the south. At San Salvatore the design involved both paring back the existing building and addition in the form of the pool, pool room and terrace. The ancient rubble stone retaining wall on the north side provided an outer edge to the asymmetrical composition of elements in the design of the pool and pool room, including the two-sided chapel terrace wall, which emphasised the diagonal view over the falling ground from the north east corner of the chapel. The pool and pool room when viewed upslope appear as a strongly modelled form, with the deep rectangular recess of the pool room framed by the two staircases. However when seen downslope the building almost disappears, as the site blends with the earth covered roof of the pool room. All that is visible is a low concrete upstand at the same level as the top of the chapel terrace wall and outer retaining wall. The start of something in the process of construction perhaps, rather than the termination of new building.

The essay title ‘Making Need Align With Desire’ is taken from Neil Levine’s essay, The Architecture of the Unfinished and the Example of Louis Kahn, (Fragments, Architecture and the Unfinished – Essays presented to Robin Middleton, edited by Barry Bergdoll and Werner Oechslin (Thames & Hudson 2006) p. 336

Mary McLeod, Order in the Details, Tumult in the Whole, (Fragments, Architecture and the Unfinished – Essays presented to Robin Middleton, edited by Barry Bergdoll and Werner Oechslin (Thames & Hudson 2006) p. 315

Andrew Houlton, Pierre d’Avoine in Marylebone (Architecture Today, issue 183, Nov/Dec 2007) pp. 56–61

Edmund N. Bacon, Medieval Design, The Structure of the Square, Design of Cities (Thames & Hudson, 1967) p. 82

Paul van der Ree, Gerrit Smienk, Clemens Steenbergen, The Concept of Stage Management, Italian Villas and Gardens (Prestel, 1992) p. 25

Section west/east through site

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Painted mdf model, Ambika P3, London

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Reflections: An Italian Job

Kuo Jze Yi, Project Architect Pierre d’Avoine Architects

Besides realising ideas, the project for San Salvatore is also a process of clarifying thoughts, or perhaps more precisely put, in this process we were searching to be convinced by ideas and solutions. It is a constantly reflective process of development, looking at geometry and composition, searching for constructional logic, imagining material joints through collage, reacting to evidence of events to find meaning, to intervene but trying not to disconnect from place, making experiments juxtaposing new and old, hoping to give the architecture an innovative condition fit for its inhabitants.

Some of these questions were resolved, most overtly through the design of the raw concrete pool room, set next to and below the chapel, and by projecting the pool towards the landscape. Some of the unknowns were discovered through daily observations on site, and some of the dilemmas were forgotten when other problems occurred.

The close collaboration and design debate with the client were actually a simultaneous process of clarification for both the client and the architect. At San Salvatore the client took on a new project to define their way of life through architecture, exploring their ideas of country living in Umbria and looking to make a particular kind of vacation home. They wanted to distil the potential of the old building and explore new materialities in order to embed their own identity in the project. Besides taking on this journey to help the clients to clarify their desires. It was also a process for us to develop new ideas and ask questions: How to connect the building to the landscape? How to add a new structure that does not blend-in but emphasises the existing architecture? How to be precise when working with irregularity? What was hidden and how to discover it? How many more details could we develop? How could we balance designing a light touch without making careless mistakes with detail?

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The process of San Salvatore has been an architectural and emotional engagement between the client, the architect and the contractor. A huge number of details were executed after many dialogues and discussions between the three parties, sometimes simple and direct, at other times irritating and reluctant. The experience and memories of this project have generated as much space for reflection as the finished architecture. It is a project that can be shared as a memory, with many details to be explored and interpreted. It is an architecture in which one can sense its construction process and experience its spatial relationship with time. This text tries to convey a glimpse of the project process. It hopes to complement the finished architecture by telling the stories behind the tireless details and the causes of some of the accidental spaces. This project reflection is written five and a half years after departing from the construction site on 9th December 2010.

THE PROCESS ON SITE We surveyed the building several times, but it was almost impossible to accurately record the old structure. We realised that mechanical precision was still a necessity, however it was a different idea about working with imperfections and finding the right adjustments over time. This approach set the attitude of the project. To achieve this level of speculation and judgement I was called to live on site to control and reflect on the design decisions through working drawings, including the width of openings and room layouts. The position of electrical switches and sockets were marked on the wall with the client to help them to imagine their future house at full scale. The careful excavations and stripping back of the existing building allowed us to discover concealed arch openings and blocked up doorways, which may have been overlooked without daily site supervision. What we have collectively created is not just a set of neat details, but a compact and very controlled assemblage of spaces. There was a dilemma in the project between wanting to be raw and rustic like the setting, but not able to let go. It is a specific strictness and spatial quality which reflects the characters of the clients that is captured in the building. This strictness was only achieved through lengthy discussion, obsessive redrawing and painstaking workmanship on site. The most tediously meticulous stage of the work was to control the height of the electric plates. The spacing between electric plates and the skirting had to be 110mm, it was particularly difficult at the location of stonewalls. The process with the electrician involved apology without compromise. The tension with the builders, caused by this millimetre scale level of control and the daily site involvement, had to be dealt with very sensitively: we argued, shook hands, exchanged sarcasms, made barbeques on site and hunted birds during the lunch hours. There was early morning espresso, endless tests on concrete finishes, the birth of my first daughter and the builder’s first son, a wedding and parties. It is almost too clichéd to write that this was an Italian Job.

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NOVEMBER 2009 RELOCATING TO THE SITE I moved from the London office to San Salvatore, with Diana my wife, in November 2009, initially living on site to keep an eye on the construction and better able to carry out daily supervision. Our intimate involvement in the building works caused some conflict between builders and ourselves. It was difficult for our design team to maintain the same intensity of focus with the builders in the translation between drawings and the reality of construction. Fortunately, the project started in winter and when it reached spring, the wonderful weather in the Umbrian landscape and the delicious Italian food and wine kept everyone on the same page of the project.

JANUARY 2010 RECONSTRUCTION OF THE EXISTING BUILDING The contractors began the interior reconstruction. Following the new layout, new window openings were carefully cut into the existing stonewalls including the bell tower. Interior walls were adjusted to form new connections between rooms. The vaulted chapel ceiling had to be repaired. It was an intensive interior reconstruction of this humble building. We were inserting new life into the broken structure and in trying to understand the historic construction, the project seemed almost archaeological. It was difficult work and sometimes dangerous for the builders. The contractor complained everyday over the design decisions suggesting it would have been much cheaper if to tear the structure down and rebuild it according to the drawings, but this would have missed the whole point of the project. One of the key discoveries was a blocked-up archway between the cantina and the existing kitchen. We adapted the kitchen design by opening up the archway and lowering the ground level in order to provide a more spacious gathering space.

MARCH 2010 A damaged fresco was discovered above the chapel vault when the re-construction of the vault was undertaken. Traces of an earlier pitched roof ceiling were discovered from the masonry details. We debated whether to restore to the pitched ceiling but also keep the arched form of the vault hanging above in order to reveal the historical evidence. Eventually it was decided to retain the latest condition of the pure vaulted ceiling and conceal the fresco. A concealed arched window opening was discovered in the upper part of the bell tower adjacent to the new master bedroom 5. The arched opening was incorporated into the design. Niches as well were transformed into shelves. In bedroom 2, a new bathroom window was carefully inserted within a blocked-up ancient doorway, and in bedroom 3 the exposed interior stone walls were retained including a small niche. Historical traces were revealed during construction. Some were retained and now appear as almost accidental in different parts of the building, They add to the understanding of the house as having a chequered history. To better distinguish the existing stone and timber structure, the new materials used in the construction were limited to mainly concrete and patinated steel. I started a close collaboration with Gianni Ferretti, the local blacksmith in January 2010. We formed an immediate bond in response to Ferretti’s craftsmanship, his problem solving ability and precision on details. He only speaks in Italian, I could only use basic Italian in describing material, dimensions and waterproofing issues but we had no problem in setting up meetings through phone and resolving tiny details in his workshop through out the project. The constant changes of dimensions and quantities of the new openings resulted in perhaps too many drawings and meetings. Some doors open outwards, some are arch shaped, some sliding, some have metal shutters, some are mounted on concrete, some mounted on stone. The patinated steel elements were carefully crafted and weathered to mimic the colour of the chestnut timber shutters, emphasising the ambiguity of the materiality of the various elements of construction.

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In March 2010 we also began the experiments with concrete. Different concrete mixtures and ingredients from local suppliers were tested. Large scale samples of different formwork including proprietary panelling and in-situ boardmarked fair-faced concrete formwork were tested. Sandblasted and hand ground polishes were tested and also stainless steel trays which were used to cast the smooth reflective interior window cills. This experimental process has contributed to the subtle layered quality of the space. However it was an unusual process for the builders. It was somehow against their tradition and ways of building that they had to cast each and every concrete element and treated each surface specifically. Fortunately, a team of very experienced timber formwork subcontractors were employed. They showed us the Santuary of Collevalenza next to Todi, by Julio Lafuente designed and built between 1962 and 1965. The highly skilful board-marked concrete used for the church had been carried out by the families of the formwork subcontractor. A variety of finishes were decided for the different concrete surfaces – polished for the ground screed, fair-faced to the window jambs, stainless steel cast to the windows cills, panelling to the utility room and board-marked for the pool and pool room structure. Careful attention was paid to the stainless steel rods used to tension the formwork, to avoid leaving rust stain on the concrete. The rods were carefully trimmed to avoid cracking the concrete. The concrete joints between wall and roof structure and the vertical and horizontal pattern of board marking were discussed and redrawn numerous times. It was probably too controlled, the plasticity of concrete was contained by the rigorous process. However the unique spatial quality of neatness and strictness can be best experienced inside the concrete pool room.

JUNE 2010 LAND EXCAVATION AND POOL DESIGN The house renovation was under control and the roof repair work was almost completed. We planned a key meeting on site with the client and Pierre d’Avoine to make decisions on the pool design on 5th June. Coincidently my first daughter was born exactly on that day in Marsciano Hospital, ten minutes drive from the site. Later in the month, the first son of the contractor, Ricardo Longari, was also born in the same hospital. In fact the younger brother Roberto Longari had got married just few weeks before. The dynamically offset plan of the pool and pool room was also finalised in this month. June was a dramatic month to all of the three parties, at project level and on a personal level.

DECEMBER 2010 I left the site, moving first to Beijing and then home to Hong Kong with my wife and daughter, after all the setting out and proportional adjustments of the house interior space and the pool structure were decided on site. The client took on the finishing stages and continued to explore and search for their idea of a vacation house in this wonderful Umbrian landscape. In 2012 the building and pool constructions were almost completed, and the client continued to explore the landscaping and gardening in relationship to the architecture and the furnishing of the interior.

APRIL 2015 The exact width of the pool room could not be determined until the land excavation had been carried out in August, as we wanted to retain the ancient masonry wall adjacent to the grand staircase leading down to the pool. This affected the setting-out of the pool room. The internal width of the pool was confidently decided by the clients as 2.1m. Its 16m length was decided in consideration of a good length for swimming and also its proportion in relation to the site and existing building. The pool width and its relationship to the site was a recurring topic for debate. In the opinion of the builder, the pool is a playground where bathing and diving must be accommodated. For the design team, the proportion of narrow projecting presence of the pool was necessary to emphasise the connection between the existing building the new pool room and terrace and the landscape, and also to fit the clients’ preference for a pool for exercise. The intrusion in to and ruination of the immediate landscape was drastic during the construction stage. The clients and I were sceptical when the land excavation started, declaring “What have we done to the land?” on several occasions when confronted by the excavation in progress. The stunning result confirms the vision of Pierre d’Avoine. The buried pool room provides hidden space to inhabit and is strongly rooted to the land as if the concrete structure was discovered rather than constructed.

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I finally went back with Diana and Ava to see the finished project. It was so exciting to be there, and experience the realisation of all the design debates and intricate construction works. My heightened emotions caused me a sleepless night. I stayed in bedroom 4, my favourite room on the top level of the house under the tall pitched roof. At 6 o’clock in the morning, the polished concrete balcony in bedroom 4 captured the morning light. Looking through the steel balustrade one can see the echoing concrete pool structure projecting in the same direction towards the vast Umbrian landscape. The carefully built space and details reminded me of the effort and time put in to the resolution of the design. San Salvatore is not just a vacation house, it is also an exploratory project in which the process of trying to figure out the relationship between a sophisticated crafted materiality and notions of humble rural living is revealed. It is a process of unearthing potentials from an existing structure, and at the same time it is a process for the client and the architect to develop their understandings of the relationship between land, architecture and people.

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Acknowledgements San Salvatore

Thanks to David Grandorge for his great generosity and wonderful photographs, and to Andrew Houlton for our conversations in the office during the project. Architects: Pierre d’Avoine Architects Pierre d’Avoine Kuo Jze Yi Mo Wong Models: Mo Wong (paper model) Catia Gomes, Joseph Halligan, Tom Harvey, Mo Wong (painted mdf model) Geometra: Ferdinando Moriconi Contractor: Longari Due s.a.s Structural Engineer: Angeletti Roberto Blacksmith: Gianni Ferretti

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Acknowledgements Monograph

While every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all copyright holders we would like to apologise should there have been any errors and omissions. If your work is uncredited please contact the publisher so it can be credited. Photography: David Grandorge Additional Photography: Guy Montagu Pollock (p12) Kuo Jze Yi (p21, p32, p33, p34, p35) Anna Chrystal Stephen (p26) Mo Wong (p27) Drawings: Plans, Elevations and Sections reproduced at 1:250 Site Plan reproduced at 1:1000 Long Section reproduced at 1:10000 Map (pp22-23): ©2021 Google, Imagery ©2021 CNES / Airbus, European Space Imaging, Landsat / Copernicus, Maxar Technologies, Map data ©2021 Texts: Peder Duelund Mortensen, Architect MAA and Associate Professor Emeritus in Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen Pierre d’Avoine, Principal, Pierre d’Avoine Architects Kuo Jze Yi, Project and Site Architect, Pierre d’Avoine Architects Book Design: Bravo. Charlie. Mike. Hotel. bcmh.co.uk Design Assistance: Sebastian Tiew, Ana Maria Nicolaescu, Georgia Hazblutzel, Ryan McStay and Amy Glover

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Published by Pattern Book Press For all enquiries contact pbp@davoine.net ISBN 978-1-9996473-0-8 A full CIP record for this publication is available from the British Library ©2021 Pierre d’Avoine Architects All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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San Salvatore Pierre d’Avoine Architects