Paolo Deganello Architetto

Prject to restore Fortezza da Basso of Florence

Project with Archizoom Ass.

 

Florence

Year:      1968

Project

 

 

An enormous steel container, equipped for display, was designed inside the Medici Fortress and filled the ancient monument in violent reflective contrast without a design of its own. In this way, the ancient architecture became the design of the modern and the cruel, cold, perfect steel “reflects” the form of the Renaissance artifact. The visitor enters a long subterranean gallery that emerges into a square “basin” with inclined walls. It is entirely covered with yellow ceramic, on whose borders a “technical” architecture grows that is camouflaged and cancelled out in the constructive technical design by a metal grid that becomes the “façade” of the four sides of the courtyard. Thanks to the grid, the architecture is reduced to a film, a homogeneous, undifferentiated surface without design. From the “basin” one ascends into an undifferentiated, furnishable space, traversed at the +5 meter level by enormous platforms sloping at a 45° angle, which once again negate the design of the space and offer themselves as large linear furnishable trays.

The architecture reveals itself to be primarily a container for events, reduced to a wrapper, it is designed starting from the urban and territorial context that generated it. These are design affirmations that anticipate the “No Stop City” project.