Moreno Pivetti
A suspended barn
MORENO PIVETTI ARCHITECTURE
A suspended barn
in Emilian, Ferrara (Italy)
A new functional polyhedron embedded in an existing envelope
The intervention concerns the emptying of a Po farmhouse from its internal structures, compromised by a violent earthquake in 2012, and the insertion inside it of a new metal frame able to rehabilitate the building for a new functional flexibility. The existing and what is added or replaced integrate and comment on each other,
in a dialogue that declares identity and differences. The assembly of modern construction materials, mechanical and serial production (iron beams), exposes the envelope, tender and handcrafted (brick facings), which from the contrast are warmer and more lively.
The project is therefore conservation and interpretation of the material text entrusted to it by time, and the incorporation of a mechanism suspended from the new portals, detached from the wall skin but anchored to it by means of solidarity devices.
Drawings
The mechanical insert inside the historical artifact is an ideological declaration of one’s otherness. An attempt is made to recover the integral dimension of the space of the old barn and therefore the possibility of perceiving the invaded space in a unitary way. The warm grain of the wall texture has been rediscovered, in order to reveal and expose its connections and stitching, accentuating the expressive message of the wall undulation. Thus, the philological rigor that guided the reinterpretation of the building led to the attribution of an almost didactic recognition to each surviving material element.
The new mechanical insert approaches the old, renoucing its reverent imitation, in the name of an active contrast that rewrites uses and spatial dynamics within the existing shell.
The calculated static balance translates the measured proportions of the original barn: the result is a new ‘intra-muros’ spatial articolation, the one necessary to renovate the building, evoking its past and redefining new uses capable of revitalizing it in the present.
Moreno Pivetti, Architetto
