- Genova, MIESUNDERSTANDING (project based in Lagos)
- Torino, Palinsestum (project based in Turin)
- Torino, FILROUGE (project based in Paris)
- Torino, “Urban existencies in Post industrial realities”, Master thesis, (project based in Genova)
Collaborations and competitions:
- Terlizzi Market, architectural competition with GMZN studio in Torino
- Maria Lai square, architectural competition with GMZN studio in Torino
- Home After crisis, YAC Academy competition with Alessandro Lando
- Petroland, YAC Academy competition
- Villa Medici competition, with Nils Freyermuth
Workshops:
- Workshop with the non-profit association “Torino Stratosferica”
- Workshop with the non-profit association “Torino Stratosferica” 2
- Workshop organized by the collective “GRRIZ” of self construction with wood
- Workshop scenographies and bamboo, La Bocciofila Rami Secchi, Torino
All the photos are taken by me except where noted.
GRUPO4! 2019
ETSAM MADRID
First approach to wood.
Working with different materials to create physical models and hand-made designs. Abstraction from function focusing on form.
The end result was a long city connecting all our designs, but in a way connected, like our drawings that were hung in a line, connected, during the final exhibition.
LAGOS MARKET 2020
DAD, Department of Design and Architecture
Genova
Our main lecturer Vittorio Pizzigoni is an architect and researcher who has written on Mies Van Der Rohe.
The purpose of the design unit was to learn how to analyse an unrealised project assigned to each group and to relocate it to another site, deconstructing its function. In the case of my group it was the National Theatre in Mannheim, which was never realised.
We subverted the internal organisation and function of thought by making a floating market in a Nigerian megacity like Lagos instead of a theatre in the cold city of Mannheim, Germany.
PALINSESTUM 2020
Polytechnic of Turin
Choosing to include this project in my portfolio is not easy, because the intervention carried out is not how I would act as an architect today.
The modelling and studies we used were good quality though, and the purpose of the building was a public space open to the outdoor park surrounding the area, which is still a theme that interests me, how to open up a space as much as possible to the surrounding environment.
Starting from the site of the old Roman theatre in ruins, we had to revive it by inserting a glass and metal structure (today it is not a very visited site compared to its surroundings), and the aim was to calculate the loads on the two materials. I say that I would not do this project again today because it is quite an aggressive intervention to emphasise an old historical site.
On one side there was the structural exercize, which was about calculating loads depending on natural phenomenas and loads of public spaces, on the other the aim of revitalizing the theather.
We recreated a new stalls without covering the ruins, that can be used for plays. The stalls is surrounded by a system of ramps (accessibility was an issue of the project) where when there is not any activity concerning the theater there will be exhibitions along the ramps and in the different rooms connected.
During the night time the building can be used as a light for the city.
LE FIL ROUGE
Polytechnic of Turin
Acting at three different scales, the aim of the project is to revitalise an area adjacent to the La Villette district of Paris, on the Canal St. Michel. The project is divided between the social and stakeholder analysis, the part relating to the function of the building (*), which is a direct consequence of it, and the urban part or public space, which I have taken care of, being the part that interests me most. Here is the master plan with some views on the following pages.
The analysis we conducted with my team on the territory was based on some concept summerized in the schema of the next page, completed by interviews conducted by phone and email with local association in Paris.
T1 T3 T2
NETWORK and CONNECTIONS
STRATEGY
The action plan is divided in two main stream of interventions: physical and conceptual.
Conceptual actions are:
Inverting (pedestrians and vehicles)
Limiting (traffic density in the streets)
Channelling (the preexistent activities into a more suitable space)
Merging (public and private uses into a hybrid space)
VALUES
Our Values: Community
Flexibility
Culture
Sustainability
Education
INNOVATION TYPOLOGY
SISTEMIC INNOVATION
regards the urban: breaking the paradigma of enclosed urban spaces: making the various urban islands that compose the site (yet so far isolated from each other) as a whole.
RADICAL INNOVATION
regards the facade: interactive facade of the new building in order to overcome the mere aesthetic fuction of it.
INCREMENTAL INNOVATION
regards the building: the basic original functions of the building are kept and boosted with new ones. Sustainability is given by the circular production and consumption of resources.
STRENGHTEN the DISTRICT IDENTITY and the LOCAL COMMUNITY
NEW BUILDINGS and INDOOR SPACES
Greenery and parks: open the fragmented green spaces to a green network that passes from the various areas of the site (private courtyard, public squares, divided green small areas).
Differenciated circulation: Use a stair as an architectural tool that leads the guests to the first/second floor on the building.
Discuraging the traffic by the change of
Make ortogonal boulevards join on the square that then divides in smaller fuctional sections with various uses.
Create open and flexible spaces that can change acording to the user necessities. Enhancing the connection on the ground floor, between the
Introduce the new grid system that visually connects all the areas of the project.
Place commercial activities (cafeteria) on the ground floor
Conceiving the new buildings with an open ground floor that connects the internal and external part.
SUSTAINABLE WAY of BUILDING and USING RESOURCES
Create a system that can host temporary activities and become charcateristic of the district in which people can identify.
Landscape designing connected to the facade design (stairs).
Conceiving the new buildings with an open ground floor that connect the internal and external part.
Enlarge the community posing a new focal point within the district
Create connection and awareness among kids and youngers for local productions and waste reduction
Enlarge the target of the project: create community engagement spacing among artists to neighbors. Strenghten the connection with the urban space.
Flexibility within the private enclosed spaces for kids.
Increase permeable surfaces.
Reduce waste materials during the construction process. Construction materials Preassembled systems Removable and
Sustainable construction process to avaid delays on site.
Minimise water usage.
Energy efficiency within the building.
Urban existencies in post industrial realities
2022
Polytechnic of Turin
Master Thesis with Professor Francesca
Frassoldati
The thesis project focused on the area of Cornigliano, a district in the West of Genoa.
This part of the city developed in different phases.
Before the 1930 the coast used to be a milestone of the Grand Tour and was mainly urbanized with villas built by wealthy families of Genoa. After this period an infrastructuring process started first with the railway following the whole Ligurian coast, and then with the industrialization process of Genoa.
Cornigliano’s access to the sea was slowly privatized by landfilling the seashore to build the industry; the inhabitants will never have any access to it again and the entire water network flow is made invisible or separated from the urban daily life.
The district rapidly converted into an industrial area and populated by a flow of immigration mainly from the South and other parts of Italy.
The characterizing element was ILVA plant, producing a great part of the steel used in Europe and it was attracting workers which contributed to make Genoa a rich and powerful city in the Mediterranean in combination with its industrial port.
The problems due to air pollution, dust and dirt became significant, concerns about the death rate of the population grew a lot in this area (such as in the ILVA from Taranto) and a group of workers mobilized by a group called “Women of Cornigliano” made it clear that a change was needed.
In 2005 the factory converted a great part of its sheds to cold steel production, which pollutes less and other structures such as the two big gasometers next to the city center were demolished.
From that moment depopulation and marginalization of the district started.
The empty spaces left by the industry are the main interest of this thesis, which starts with an overview of similar processes in other parts of Italy, France and other European cities on the Mediterranean sea.
This model of industrial decommissioning left empty spaces that today are attracting our attention being part of our realities everyday. And it is not a rare phenomena. The analysis continues focusing on the meaning we can give to those spaces. Where natural flows used to balance a long ago and were destroyed after human intervention, after decommissioning due to lack of interest from institutions and potential investors of huge spaces, abandonment and time passing offer new ground for forms of nature that are occupying those spaces.
There are different mentalities about how to approach and design those spaces. Mine, after a long analysis, lot of reading and extensive surveys, seeing the subtly transforming site in different seasons, is about making those areas accessible in a small percentage, respecting and celebrating how the natural flows of events manipulate the area.
The thesis is for me a way of defining an ethic on planning after five years of studying how to do it, deconstructing it and finding what I think is the designerly way to less impactive solution.
The site is analysed starting from the terrain vague constituted by the demolition of the factories components to the two borders with water bodies: the sea and the river. Both the water bodies have been colonised and industrialized by human beings and consequently abandoned, with the crisis of the industries in Italy.
This generates a new form of nature which I analysed along my reasearch.
The project will modifiy the space as less as possible, opening, connecting areas, making them accessible, but respecting the ecosystems that grew up during these years of abandonment.
An important part of the work was the analysis of population changes and cementification in the neighbourhood before, during and after the activation of the industry.
Through this process of analysis and collaboration with the local association, I realised that I did not want to engage in a participatory process, since the actors I was trying to involve wanted to build and heavily modify an environment that had already been transformed a lot in the past.
The collages and projects I made therefore only concern the opening, securing, and accessibility of spaces that now exist and are either empty or used as car parks, such as the old market square in the upper collage, or the old industrial land in the second, where the infrastructure of the ring road pitted by tunnels already existed.
The aim is to touch as much as possible, acting non-aggressively, but still defining this architecture.
What happens if we leave things as they are?
Those urban realities are already being reclaimed by a new
Collages of photos taken by me.
new form of nature.
TERLIZZI MARKET
2023 with GMZN Studio
The goal of the project was to pursue a revitalization of the Terlizzi market to make it not only a shopping space, but also a social and public space. To do this, we decided to remove the existing market stalls, which were concentrated along the entrances, blocking flows and light, and to move this function to the center of the building. In addition, we decided to make these stands flexible, so that they could be partially or totally dismantled when the market ends its functions (around lunchtime), to leave room for other possible uses: workshops, after-school activities, restoration.
When activities are “off,” it is possible to bring down tents that will transform our booth into a kind of “lantern.”
The roof and surrounding areas have been replaced by sidewalks and connected with
the inner part, which will remain open as a covered public square at night.
Color and pedestrianization are the two main actions used to create a safe and comfortable environment. Depending on the function, the cover will be arranged in different ways.
The project obtained the second price on an international competition.
MARIA LAI SQUARE 2023
with GMZN Studio
Requailification of a square in the villagge of Ulassai in Sardinia. The design is inspired by the work of the know artist Maria Lai, orginally from Ulassai, who realised art work with participatory processes involving the inhabitants; this by connecting houses and nature physically, with a blue rope. Our project aims at remembering her work and creating different areas of public spaces, with different functions, by fragmenting it, at the same time it creates areas of nature that will be preserved and not accessible.
From this plan and drawing we can identify the different scenarios in which we imagined the project to be lived.
1) The upper part of the square, from where you can have a view of the village, we designed stairs to sit on with the same material as the steps on the square.
2) The market area, which was one of the requirements of the competition, we placed it here because the street level is at the same time as the green area, therefore accessible to vehicles.
3) The school garden, where the walkways create an enclosed space for the students to play during breaks, but detached from the public space.
4) The play area, with climbable structures and spaces to sit and watch the children play.
5) The exhibition area, to display the works of Maria Lai and other artists, through open calls, etc.
Giardino scolastico e gioco dell’oca
Area carrabile adibita a mercato
Belvedere Nord
Pensilina e zona espositiva
Area Gioco
YAC Competition Home After Crisis
2023
with Alessandro Lando
Architectural competition about home emergency, self construction techniques and natural materials based in Nigeria.
The inspirations and ideas came from the famous egyptian architect Hassan Fathy that we met during our lectures of self-construction, sustainable and low cost techniques. He is recently bumping up more and more in our daily lives and his revolutionary ideas are increasingly regaining value in a society (not only the Nigerian one) where we need to look at the future with a different mentality.
Another renowned architect who helped us in the thinking of creating easily mountable home devices was Fabrizio Carola, who we return to with the compass technique to achieve the position of every single
brick in order to construct the self-supporting shape of the geodesic dome.
The project starts from these two attitudes and looking especially at self-construction aims at finding a solution for an incremental housing system. The outcome is a module which is not only simple to build and low cost, but also resistant to strong wind and storm events thanks to its formula of “three into one”, meaning that in one structure we have skin, roof and structure all compact. Most of the materials used for the structures are low-tech and available, earth, bamboo and for the covering and protection from rain we choose to use mortar. The following project is the solution we thought could fit better with your requirements.
YAC competition
The PPP 2024
Bonjour! We are pleased to present the outcome of days of work over the theme of reusing oil platforms in Adriatic sea! We are the annoying, lazy, politically correct generation, with social medias and other distractions, we don’t really know how to use time, we don’t really know what we’ll do in the future, we have no ambition, no courage. We are molluscs, like the ones who grew under the oil platforms. We look with melancholy at your generation, crying in a room scrolling down our phones. We requalify, reuse stuff, for a better future, we transform a lot of abandoned spaces in cultural centers, hotels and student housing, universities, because that’s what our world need! That’s the future! Requalification, regeneraton, revitalization, flexibility, sustainability, reuse, connections, place making, city making! And now also sea making!
Bonjour! We are pleased sea! We are the annoying, really know how to are molluscs, like the We look with melancholy We requalify, reuse and student housing, Requalification, regeneraton, And now also sea making!
Genesis of an idea
Coney Island, first amusement Park in the world. from Delirious New York Fire shows.
Coney Island burnt down!
Abandoned sea structures, not used anymore
Inclusive, accessible and cheap pure fun!
Sweet memories from childwood :)
The album I listened to the day before the delivery
pleased to present the outcome of days of work over the theme of reusing oil platforms in Adriatic annoying, lazy, politically correct generation, with social medias and other distractions, we don’t use time, we don’t really know what we’ll do in the future, we have no ambition, no courage. We the ones who grew under the oil platforms. melancholy at your generation, crying in a room scrolling down our phones. reuse stuff, for a better future, we transform a lot of abandoned spaces in cultural centers, hotels housing, universities, because that’s what our world need! That’s the future! regeneraton, revitalization, flexibility, sustainability, reuse, connections, place making, city making! making!
Kiosk
Carousel
Toilets
Beach volley camp
Sandy beach
Circus
Solar panels! ;)
Flying seats carousel
Big theathre or rave zone
High lines
Psychedelic tunnel
Big bench
Bumper cars
Bar and hall
Toilets
Kitchen
Dyning room
Open air tables
Fishing area
Panoramic wheel
Flying swings
Fake amacas
Elastic grid
Elastic grid
Yellow submarine
Green Roof - Palm trees
Camping area
Villa Medici competition 2024 with Nils Freyermuth
The aim of the competition was to sketch the project for a possible hut in Villa Medici’s garden in Rome.
The team we picked starts from a quotation by Italo Calvino ‘The invisible landscape is an expression of a visible landscape’, a story about the city of Isaura, from which we tried to connect the site to the city of Rome, which surrounds it. To do this, we made use of some ruins (columns) in the garden that represent the past, and around it we created our hut, which not only allows us, the visitors, to admire the past from an elevated viewpoint, but by means of a camera obscura system projects a 360° image collected in the 8-metre high tower onto a canvas inside the structure, comparing past and future.
WOOD WORKSHOP
2021-2023
Precollinear park
Volunteering for building a park and self building workshops for urban fornitures.
WORKSHOPTHE PARK IN 2030VISIONS
WOOD
SELF-BUILDING WORKSHOP 2023 GRIZZ STUDIO
Design and realization of 3 small tower in the wood in front of the villagge restored by Giancarlo de Carlo. Use of wood and natural coloration techniques.
Picture by Nils Freyermuth
WORKSHOPBUILDING SCENOGRAPHIES WITH BAMBOO
BAMBOO WORKSHOP 2023
Bocciofila Rami Secchi
Opportunity to organize a self building workshops of bamboo and papier- mache, for which I did these photos and the flyer on the left page.
From the bamboo harvesting on Turin hills to techniques to split it and tie canes together.
