2007       

GYMNASIUM  EX  MICHELUCCI FOUNDRY

a school gymnasium in the former Michelucci foundry - Pistoia

national competition

1st  Place.

In 2007 the Province of Pistoia launched a national competition to make a gymnasium in the city center, in the area where the Michelucci foundry used to stand. The new building was to serve the Istituto Filippo Pacini secondary school which is located nearby.

Once it ceased its activity in 1976, the foundry had remained stratified in the city's memory as a piece of industrial archaeology; its architectural parts were joined by overgrown vegetation, which also exalted the pathos of the place's memory.

The very narrow area available, the great urban concentration around it, the space's monolithic volume: all these elements influenced our choice to make a building partially buried underground. We decided to use steel as a way of speeding up construction and creating less disturbance during the course of realization.

The project recalls the pre-existing building's morphology, dense with history, signs, and stratifications that havew sedimented over time and indeed, have almost crystallized.

It was, therefore, necessary to keep those signs (the large central shed, the smoke stack, the brick tower, the historical wall flanking via dell’Anguillara) and to make them more explicit.

Seeking compatibility with the competitions requirements for spaces and functions, the project sought to emphasize the idea of the recovery of open and of green spaces.

In this sense we felt it was right to operate not by adding spaces but by subtraction.

By covering the activity space with a green roof, a sort of vertical shift of the terrain is achieved. 

Virtually extruding space is bordered by continuous glassed-in surfaces which allow the passage of light, thus illuminating the undergound indoor spaces.

Public activity such as the extrascholastic events  held in the small gymnasium and the 'space of memory' (dealing with the foundry's period of production), located in the brick tower, will take place, instead, above ground and in the spaces just off the garden area under examination.