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Atmospheric architecture Arte Sella is a place for extreme contact with the sublime, provided by the large valley of preserved nature and art. In this sense, it is important to understand the ethos of the park: a place where the artists produce their work with materials provided by nature and that nature modifies it over time and season. In short, Arte Sella is for this project: a place for deep symbiosis between nature and art. Considering this project, our approach is to use architecture as the structure of support for this symbiosis – an architecture that does not struggle for protagonism. Instead of composition, we propose an architecture of disposition. Not objects, but atmospheres. This approach puts architecture not as the medium between experience and the sublime, but rather as a stimulator of one’s own path. As such, architecture is freed from the need to mimic or translate nature: we are invited to experience nature without translators, through our bare presence in it. Park Masterplan Our first proposition is a comprehensive masterplan for Arte Sella. The masterplan approach focuses on understanding Arte Sella as a park, considering the buildings proposed by the competition as structuring parts of this park. Given the large scale of Art Sella, if architectures are considered isolated, they would claim a sort of absolute individuality. Instead, a territorial approach considers these architectures in a way that the relation between objects within this territory reinforce the understanding of Arte Sella as a whole. This approach led us to propose three intertwining fields to conform the park masterplan for Arte Sella, which are not hierarchically organised, but complementary of each other. Field 1: Memory-Course. The first strategy seeks to understand the pre-existence of the Arte Natura course as mark of memory. Memory as a course implies considering time not as instant, but as a fluid matter that includes therefore the changes coming from nature, even with the storm.Architecture becomes a path that leads us to the works that, although modified by trees, or excess of rain, were shaped in their memory by these temporal events. The result is an architecture that works as if to materialise a field of memories – those that happened and those to be remembered.
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Field 2: Figure of presence. The second field is associated with the ateliers’ location. They were positioned in a wide plane that merges in the extremities with the dense vegetation that climbs the mountains. The strategy of placement of these workshops follows the logic of figure, as absolute geometry is positioned in a vast natural background. As figures, although they have a precise presence, their existence is minimized in relation to this wide natural space. Field 3: Infrastructural ground. The third field unites the most consolidated infrastructures of the park, in order to organise and potentially stimulate different kinds of use, from artists, to visitors and staff. The third field is Arte Sella’s ground – a topographic logic that organises activities. Functions follow nature. Firstly we propose that a museum is placed near the main entrance, this location is guided by the previous path of Arte Natura, one’s that suffered several changes by the storm. For this reason, it’s important to reinforce that’s strength by the strategy of a memory-course. We propose that auditorium, workshop and an expanded restaurant to be placed in the ‘end’ of the park, working as an attractor to visitors: in this way, a ordinary visit to the restaurant for feed implies engaging with the park as a whole. With regards to the auditorium, workshop and expansion of the restaurant, we propose an approach that takes advantage of the open space in between existing buildings. The relationship between these architectures now forms an unconstructed space where all facades communicate with the open area, making it more important than each object per se. Open space is the infrastructural ground that articulates and converges different activities and flows.
Is art an object or a field? How can we design a museum for a field? If framed and made still by an act of capture – as Benjamin, Barthes and Deleuze would theorize for the case of photography – life becomes still life, or, in Latin languages, ‘natura morta’, ‘dead nature’. Art in Arte Sella is never dead. It produces an alive field of ways to access nature’s sublime ‘disgovernance’. This field is not always in complete compliance with nature’s temperaments – art is not the passive, but the active engagement. A response from nature is not always complete destruction. Instead, it reveals the power of this field in its infinite dialogue with the sublime. Instead of transferring the artistic interventions that suffered the most due to extreme weather – or extreme engagement – to a ‘framing space’, we proposed that they remain in their original locations, as a continuation of their existence as a field – as ‘alive art’. In order to compose this museum as a path, the common uses was break up along the course. In the entrance, a small foyer, in the middle of the route, an area for exhibition, where the pictures of their previous state is exhibited. In the major building, as in all the museum, the most important is the path, that here is the circulation. Inside this building, the atmosphere is like a discovering, similar to the experienced in the forest. The blocks nearest to the entrance belongs to the administration area and the appearance is of a opaque glass, hiding the exposition area: with a skylight and a tree inside the building.
First building: Foyer
Last building: Cafe
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First building: Foyer
Major building: Exposition area
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Major building: Exposition area
Last building: Cafe
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The studios are made of four types of presence in nature. The first one is the outside – both earth and world are inescapable – there is no other earth, there is no other world; and life is both natural and mundane, grounded in our relationship with others. The first presence is made tangible by the second one, which is the circular transition space between outside and inside, between all others and oneself, between nature as it is and nature as lived from the artificial, between a totality of enclosed space and the endlessness of everything else. The third presence is each one’s own nature, the absolute individuality, the infinite universe within each one’s life – an absolute enclosed space. The fourth presence in nature is a direct relationship between one’s own universe and all the other universes – it is a room where sky and body touch each other. The studios are not comfortable spaces. Instead of artificially protecting artists from the environment, the studios promote an extreme relationship with climate. Walls, passages, windows, materials and light are combined in ways to prevent architecture to pre-condition the relationship between artists and the environment. The studios stimulate artists to create and inhabit their own balance with nature.
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Auditorium and Workshops The auditorium is situated in the area of the pre-existent infrastructure as a strategy of creation of a square beside the restaurant expansion. The project consider the exchange of knowledge between the people as an experience of nature through the collective. This ideology turns into material through a logic that breaks the boundaries of the building, using a free ground floor as the auditorium, using the stair to reach the workshop area as the bleachers, making a unpredictable scenario, touching the nature. Beyond the presentations, it is possible that the studios happens in the open area, while the rooms for the workshop are in the second floor.
Gumbrecht proposes that our most extreme form of producing presence is by eating the world. Indeed, several ancient forms of access to the sublime include eating rituals – from collective to intimate, from fasting to feasting. A restaurant in Artsella is not a place for the banal refill. Instead, it promotes eating as part of a complete experience with nature – as a ceremonial practice of eating the world and becoming a part of it. In this sense, we propose that the restaurant’s expansion focus on producing spaces for collective and ‘ceremonial’ eating. This place is not furnished with small tables, but long ones that promote the contact with others, potentially creating warm conversations fed by good food and drinks.
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