Paolo Ferrari Architect - Portfolio

“Bologna-Battiferro: lungo l’argine, guardando il cielo”.

University of Bologna`s Department of Astronomy and Institute of Astronomic Observatory (master’s thesis, 2006)

Arquitectum NY 2007 New York, New York, USA

(Ideas competition, 2007)

Addition to the municipal building, Calderara di Reno, (BO), Italy

(Ideas competition, 2007)

Secondary school “Don Lorenzo Milani”, Vicchio (FI), Italy

(Ideas competition, 2008)

Project for a multi-functional area: "Città della Musica" ("Music City"), Viadana (MN), Italy

(Ideas competition, 2009)

House on the beach at the Bahamas

(Ideas competition, 2009)

“Green 360” Residential complex in Lima, Peru

(Ideas competition, 2009)

“Progetto in evoluzione” Giò Ponti e Villa Favorita a Valdagno (VI), Italy

(Ideas competition, 2010)

Serlachius museum Gösta extension Mänttä, Finland

(Ideas competition, 2011)

“Competition for proposals on the use of the area named ”Terrazza dei Tirreni”, Cecina, (LI), Italy

(Ideas competition, 2011)

Project: “Bologna-Battiferro: lungo l’argine, guardando il cielo”.

University of Bologna`s Department of Astronomy and Institute of Astronomic Observatory (master’s thesis)

Year:

2006

Notes: This work is a project for an area in the northern suburbs of Bologna, also known as Battiferro, where the new Astronomy Department of Bologna University and the Astronomy Institute are planned to be built. The site is defined by elements that have shaped its identity along time. Above all, the Navile Canal (a formerly navigable waterway which has been of the utmost importance for the city economy for many centuries) is a constant presence around which many of the other most significant parts were organized. Among these, of particular relevance are buildings tied to the shipway administration, in order to keep it navigable and provide irrigation to the surrounding territory, as well as for all the productive activities that have been depending on the waterway until the first half of the twentieth century.

Project: “Bologna-Battiferro: lungo l’argine, guardando il cielo”.

University of Bologna`s Department of Astronomy and Institute of Astronomic Observatory (master’s thesis)

Year:

2006

Notes: Other parts, more recent and not related to the canal, contribute in defining the site’s identity: railways, partly abandoned and partly waiting to be revamped and integrated in the city’s transportation system, as well as a large National Research Council facility.

What’s planned for this area is, along with the new high speed trains station and the new Municipal offices, among a group of projects that are aiming to start a development process for the districts in which they’re located, seeking a requalification and a reconnection of those to the rest of the city.

The actual design began only after an analysis, carried forward at several levels.

First, a historical one, with an investigation on the industrial development in the city and on the Navile’s origin and history, since it’s been the key for productive activities along its banks in the past, and still is a fundamental sign in the area’s morphology.

Project: “Bologna-Battiferro: lungo l’argine, guardando il cielo”.

University of Bologna`s Department of Astronomy and Institute of Astronomic Observatory (master’s thesis)

Year:

2006

Notes: Then, a study on the urban status spotted problems in the area that could be faced and possibly solved with the project: from the general degradation afflicting the Navile’s course, to the lack of connections to the surrounding urban fabric. The analysis thus provided grounds for the design’s guidelines, either about its formal aspects and relation to the site’s identity, or aiming at solving the spotted issues.

Project-wise, the first step has been organizing a system to restore interrupted communication between the area and the urban fabric around it, with the purpose of obviating its isolation and the consequent degradation that it’s been facing at least since the 1960’s. Such system consists of a road network, connecting the new buildings to the external surroundings, and paths, allowing an optimal circulation for people within the planned installation.

Project: “Bologna-Battiferro: lungo l’argine, guardando il cielo”.

University of Bologna`s Department of Astronomy and Institute of Astronomic Observatory (master’s thesis)

Year:

2006

Notes: The architecture`s formal aspects and part of its organization are largely based on elements related to the canal’s history and life, trying to connect to the area’s identity, as well as renovating and revaluing it.

In this respect, the overall layout is related to the Navile’s subdivision in two parallel courses (one for navigation and one for irrigation) that takes place right in this area, as well as the waterway’s nature, with the architecture placed along its bank, echoing and accommodating to the ever moving shape of the former shipway.

Other choices, like the substantial linguistic uniformity of the waterfront elevation, as well as the walkways along the banks, are references to the boats that navigated on this canal for centuries and the paths that would allow towing them from the banks with horses.

Project: “Bologna-Battiferro: lungo l’argine, guardando il cielo”.

University of Bologna`s Department of Astronomy and Institute of Astronomic Observatory (master’s thesis)

Year:

2006

Notes: The project consists of three main buildings, placed along the eastern bank of the Navile Canal. The southern one, on three levels with the lowest one underground, hosts a library, classrooms and offices for the Astronomy Department and it’s connected to a smaller edifice, where the cafeteria is located.

The northern building, also on three levels, contains offices and laboratories of the Astronomy Institute, as well as a large exposition area and a planetarium. The central edifice outlines a wide covered volume hosting an auditorium, a cafeteria and a gift shop, and it’s conceived, like the exposition area to which is directly connected, as a sort of a public indoor space, thus contributing to the project’s ultimate goal, wich would be redesigning an area in order to give it back to the city, as the most evident concern is its isolation, leading to an overall degradation of its surroundings.

Project: Arquitectum NY 2007 (ideas competition) In collaboration with: Arch. Alessandra Abbondanza Arch. Luca Ferrari (www.dadoarchitetti.it)

Year:

2007

Notes: The challenge proposed by the competition was to come up with a design for a new monument to celebrate the cosmopolitan, urban and global character of New York City. That had to be achieved by designing a 100 metre-high towermuseum, displaying personal effects, souvenirs and photos belonging to a new generation of immigrants who –from 1960 onwards– arrived in the city in search of the “American Dream”.

The tower had to be located on a pier projecting from Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan.

The program planned a group of spaces to serve specific functions, distributed along the tower: an entrance hall, temporary and permanent exhibition rooms, offices, a cafeteria, urban balconies, as well as all the needed "service" spaces as storage, maintenance and rest rooms. The project is organized around a central modular core, which serves as the main structural element and hosts elevators and staircases for vertical circulation.

Connected to the core are two organic volumes: the one above the pier hosts all the museum's main spaces and functions, while the one on the opposite side contains the "service" areas as well as the offices. All these spaces are enclosed by a translucent and sinuous skin wich aims to give continuity to the tower's appearance, as well as acting as a counterpoint to the structural core’s regular geometry.

Project: Addition to the municipal building, Calderara di Reno, (BO), Italy (ideas competition) In collaboration with: Arch. Alessandra Abbondanza Arch. Luca Ferrari (www.dadoarchitetti.it)

Year:

2007

Notes: The Municipality of Calderara di Reno, a small town near Bologna, Italy, had planned an addition to the town-hall, in order to add-up to the insufficient existing administrative spaces.

A preliminary design with the main spaces' disposition already laid out was provided to the contestants.

The new building had to be connected to the historic town-hall and an existing addition, acting as a dialog-fostering element between them, as well as with the adjacent public square.

A reference originated the design’s idea: the barn that's typically found in the area's rural landscape; its model was developed by architect Carlo Francesco Dotti in the 18th century. Such reference is suggested as a cultural connection to the place, but reworked as part of a clearly contemporary architecture, with its influence mainly noticeable in the brick pillars facing the town's main square.

Other main elements in the design are the outer part of a double skin, made up by a wood and metal windows system aiming to give the offices as much flexibilty as possible in terms of light and ventilation, and the wing-shaped roof, which hosts a group of solar panels and hides most of the building's heating and air conditioning systems.

Project: Secondary school “Don Lorenzo Milani�, Vicchio (FI), Italy (ides competition) In collaboration with: Arch. Alessandra Abbondanza Arch. Luca Ferrari (www.dadoarchitetti.it)

Year:

2008

Notes: School levels from preschool to primary in Vicchio, a town in Tuscany's Mugello area, were hosted in a complex composed by a few buildings at the limit of its historical centre. The competition asked for projects for adding the middle school to the complex, and proposed the use of the adjacent old football field as an integral part of the site.

The new architecture was asked to play an important role in the overall urban structure. In fact it had to foster a connection between parts of the city that the urban void represented by the football field had kept separated until then. The site's morphology added difficulty to the assignment, with its eastern border, where the new main entrance had to be placed, being several metres above the rest of the building area, with a dramatic difference in height in correspondence of the football field, since this had to be partially excavated into the ground to overcome the hilly nature of the place.

The project develops itself along a main axis, a "new street" striving to operate the needed connection by means of passages and ramps running alongside the new building, permitting public fruition while keeping the school's own circulation system and activities isolated. All the needed spaces in the new school are distributed on three stories in a new building placed between the existent old school, to which is connected, and the former football field, partially reused as garden for the new facility, as well as a public parking place.

Project: Project for a multi-functional area: "Città della Musica" ("Music City"), Viadana (MN), Italy, 2009 (ideas competition) In collaboration with: Arch. Alessandra Abbondanza Arch. Luca Ferrari (www.dadoarchitetti.it)

Year:

2009

Notes: A music school, a 500 seat theatre and commercial activities were the main needed functions in this multipurpose project for the town of Viadana, in northern Italy's Lombardy region, just north of the river Po. The site is on the outer fringes of the city, where the mix of historical rural buildings and recent residential urbanization starts to give way to the open and flat landscape of this region's countryside.

The project was expected to expand the town centre's urban and social influence to a marginal zone placed among some cultivated fields and a wide unused area, supposed to be turned into a park later on.

The public "piazza", the square, a fundamental element in the life of any Italian town, is the base concept for the project, with the aim of setting a new focal point for the town's cultural and social life. The layout follows this idea, functions are organized around a central space, triggering relations between the project's elements, as well as them and the surrounding areas. The whole architecture has a connection with the “piazza”, either direct, like for the shops, or visual, for the music school's upper story on the opposite side, below which the space is open to grant permeability towards the planned park.

A unifying linguistic element is the material of which the area’s traditional red bricks are made, reinvented as an external layer that adapts to the functional needs, becoming roof, wall, sunshield, while giving the buildings a consistent appearance.

Project:

House on the beach at the Bahamas (ideas competition) In collaboration with: Arch. Alessandra Abbondanza Arch. Luca Ferrari (www.dadoarchitetti.it) Arch. Paul Whitworth (www.whitworth-design.com)

Year: 2009 Notes: On a beautiful private beach nearby Nassau, Bahamas, the task was the design of a large house, composed by two separate apartments for visitors in addition to the owners' and their personnel's ones, providing accommodation for up to four families.

The project was influenced by the goal of taking advantage of the site’s natural beauty and potential for an amazing view over the ocean.

A rocky promontory on the shore served as an inspiration for the appearance of the house and a design axis that cuts the building in half, connecting it to the beach and generating its main entrance and distributive nucleus. It’s a sequence of increasingly opening spaces, from the entry hall, through the living area, to the outside patio and the pool, a last stage on a path from the artificial environment (house) to the natural (beach).

The building can be seen as a metaphor of those rocks lying on the sand on the property, a distinctive element of the beach’s natural appeal. A series of “blocks” overlay other parts, not just as a mere formal choice, but generating distributive solutions as well as considering the spaces’ relation to the climatic conditions: the south side is as “closed” as possible, with the “blocks” providing overhangs and shade for the openings at the ground floor. The north side on the other hand, opens toward the ocean, taking advantage of the site’s orientation.

Project: “Green 360” Residential complex in Lima, Peru (ideas competition) In collaboration with: Arch. Alessandra Abbondanza Arch. Luca Ferrari (www.dadoarchitetti.it)

Year: 2009 Notes: In this case the task was to design two residential building types, which had to be placed repeatedly on a steep hillside plot, following a given arrangement. Given were also the number of four apartments per building and their disposition: two above and two below the entry and parking area.

Due to a specific request in the program, each building has a chromatic identification, which makes it recognizable. This is obtained by using coloured metal panels in contrast with the overall exterior white plaster surface. Every single building's coloured section connects visually with its neighbours, obtaining a matching chromatic scale that works as a whole for the project. White plaster and metal define on the outside the living units, while all the public, connecting and distributing areas are identified by continuous translucent and opaque glazing.

The ensemble could be seen as a small district itself, almost a portion of a village, due to the plots’ layout. This has great potential in developing good social interaction within this new neighbourhood, making it a "living" entity and thus contributing in enhancing the overall experience of those who’d live there.

Project: “Green 360�

Residential complex in Lima, Peru (ideas competition) In collaboration with: Arch. Alessandra Abbondanza Arch. Luca Ferrari (www.dadoarchitetti.it)

Year: 2009 Notes: The "village" image also influenced the apartment’s layout to some extent, and it is, along with the thought of designing "four houses on top of each other", a significant contribution to the way the units are shaped, each one with its own variations on a common theme.

Each apartment has two levels, allowing for a double height living/dining area with large openings to the outside terrace, thought more as a sort of a courtyard for each one of these houses (which all sum up to the "village" idea).

Smaller occasional balconies are placed at the upper floor in some of the apartments, overlooking the main one below and therefore adding to the concept of treating the latter as "the house's courtyard".

Finally, the will of giving as much of the view over the city to as many rooms as possible, was crucial in defining the apartments' plans, with the kitchen/dining/living area and studio, along with the master bedroom on the upper floor, in a privileged position, to get the best in terms of viewing possibilities. This concept has also shaped the buildings, by framing the views from the inside spaces through big windows and by their volumetric geometries' articulations.

Project: “Progetto in evoluzione” Giò Ponti e Villa Favorita a Valdagno (VI), Italy (ideas competition) In collaboration with: Arch. Alessandra Abbondanza Arch. Luca Ferrari (www.dadoarchitetti.it)

Year:

2010

Notes: The foundation's ruins of a never ended mansion in a glade at the center of a northern Italy town’s park. The need to organize the area as the reference point for a range of cultural activities to be held there all year long.

Park and mansion were both commissioned by a local family of entrepreneurs; Italian architect Gio Ponti designed the house in the late 1930's, but its construction had to be interrupted due to world war 2.

The design concept is based on the idea of the foundation as the project's functional core, and on the search for a dialogue between it and the surroundings. A few fundamental choices were made: firstly, the excavation of the ground around the foundation itself to create an area that would foster the interaction with the outside, as well as granting accessibility to the planned spaces; secondly, the addition of new volumes above the existing ones to help accomodate all the carried out activities; finally, a shell-shaped glazed cover puts the designed spaces in relation with the outside, and defines a volume in which activities can take place in constant dialogue with the park, independently of the weather and the time of the year.

Project: Serlachius museum Gösta extension Mänttä, Finland (ideas competition) In collaboration with: Arch. Alessandra Abbondanza Arch. Luca Ferrari (www.dadoarchitetti.it)

Year:

2010/2011

Notes: The scope of the program and the area's extent and remarkable landscape features conveyed the concept towards the idea of an architecture striving to dialogue with the surroundings, while becoming a distinctive sign at a land scale.

These early assumptions led to a project developing itself along a path, a primary axis that allows a diffusion of the needed functions on the area.

The path is fundamental in the shaping of the architecture. Beyond connecting the project’s different parts, and above all, it plays an active role in the visiting experience. It becomes an exhibition space itself, allowing the visitor to witness the beauty of the museum's surroundings in a continuous direct relation with the landscape.

This axis collects the main distributive public and service routes, optimizing their way through the project's parts and avoiding their mixing by organizing them on two floors for most of its length, so that the visiting experience is uninterrupted.

The project's elements aspire to communicate with the site also through a common language that gives the intervention a consistent appearance while maintaining readable all of its parts' differentiations. Under an external laminated wood beams structure unifying all of the parts' appearance, the various functional needs dictate how glazed and opaque roofing (metal sheets) and external walls (wooden sidings) are placed, introducing a variability within the overall language's consistency.

Project: “Competition for proposals on the use of the area named �Terrazza dei Tirreni�, Cecina, (LI), Italy (ideas competition) In collaboration with: Arch. Alessandra Abbondanza Arch. Luca Ferrari (www.dadoarchitetti.it)

Year:

2011

Notes: Inside and around a pre-existing 1920s bathing establishment, supposed to become part of the project, a number of functions had to be conceived and laid out in order to turn an area owned by the municipality into a multipurpose public space for the city.

Fundamental in influencing the project were the sea and the pine forest between which the site is placed, two strong natural elements in an area otherwise decidedly defined by the work of man. Almost naturally, the thought of the architecture as an ideal connecting medium between them, with a sequence of functions and activities arranged under, and sheltered by, a wide cover, took shape. The cover would act as a metaphor of the two natural elements, and a fusion of some of their peculiarities. Hence the structure's wavy shape, the trees inspired supports and the whole suggestion of a mantle providing protection with varying degrees of permeability towards the outside, much like a forest does.

The laminated wood structure extends itself across the road and toward the beach, acting as a sunshade device and protecting spaces for public activities and seaside life and finally pushing itself on the water to form a pier and complete the connection between sea and forest.