DEMOGO
Architecture and Projects in Complex Contexts With images by Iwan Baan
Birkhäuser
Basel
Contents
Town Hall, Gembloux
Fables from Wallonia by Pippo Ciorra
Malga Fosse Mountain Hut, Rolle Pass
Bivouac Fanton, Marmarole
Petrarca Mountain Hut, Pfelders
Introduction
In 2007 we began to develop the idea of applied research and collaboration in architecture drawing on personal outlooks and approaches. This, for us, was a moment that defined our respective expectations and interests, an attempt to find common ground within the architectural field.
This documents what became a very fertile period for us. It sums up a process of research applied to the specificities and evolutionary potential of various places, striking a delicate balance between interpretation and openness towards new areas of experimentation.
Each site is grasped in its dynamic complexity, both as a unique, autonomous, and independent project and as a set of elements embedded in a relational context, which is understood as the layered presence of components of various natures. Our projects pick up on unexpected relationships and build connections between the different layers of meaning enshrined in these places. The cultural, physical, and social contexts, the economic-strategic context, the material context, the imaginary context, and the natural context thus constitute nonhomogeneous and unique elements of each project.
Observation and interpretation provide the basis for our working method. Each context represents an open geography of concepts and spaces, a system of open relationships, independent and modifiable. We cannot think of architecture as an isolated phenomenon, for we never view it as an object to be resolved merely in terms of formal autonomy. Instead, it represents a totality defined by the combined and often conflicting presence of morphological
layout, usage, times and all things nonmaterial that define both its properties and limitations.
We experience the project stage as a reasoned creative moment, investigating potential and strategies through cumulative and dissipative processes, registered and ordered so as to generate meaning, while still leaving room for the unexpected.
In our work, architecture is always understood as a public space and an opportunity for collective identification. We work through emotional devices that can engage people and amplify the specific atmospheric conditions of the environment. Moving and observing are fundamental primary practices that we always try to organize into complex sections, such as the stairs for Bivouac Fanton, the offices of the Financial Police in Bologna, and the Palazzo Carcano Courthouse, which are all dynamic and stimulating devices for spatial interaction.
The projects thus become part of the landscape, hinting at a perceptive panorama, and their tectonic register defines a form of integrated and unpredictable presence within, which emerges with great force and tension, in active dialogue with the context.
Our intention is to nurture relationships at various levels so visual planes merge and overlap in a continuous dialogue between elements near and far, which alternate in an act evocative of the atmospheres and material presences of various habitats. This programmatic study of how buildings at scale interact with the landscape seeks to open up new ways of perceiving and experiencing built space.
Our work is implemented through the visual orientation of the volumetric form present in many projects or on the construction of spatial sequences between interconnected realms, in tension with the intermediate threshold between inside and out. Several spatial devices emerge as recurring elements in our works—rampways, articulated roofing, and areas of transition from private to public spheres—hinting at a preoccupation with sequences of movement and dynamics in the relationship with the environment.
Starting with the Town Hall in Gembloux, Belgium, in 2009, we embarked on a process of finding spaces within which to develop innovative and critical approaches that involve tension between various levels.
The book moves along a timeline, which acts as an objective mechanism for laying out a noninterpretive succession of experiences while conveying a specific relationship with each project.
Each project described in this book contains a series of occurrences and reflections that drive and connect our work in a way that is hard to define through a single register. Certain recurring themes emerge, but never with a single language or syntax imposed from the outset; instead, it is the places and their underlying tensions that attract and drive our interest.
Contexts change, and with them our projects. Our architecture involves the application of theories and responds to precise and unique conditions. In this book, just as in our work, the essential backgrounds of the people
who inhabit the realities we confront coexist with the ensuing emotional aspects that are also bound up in the physical structures.
Architecture inevitably leads one to question the multitude of needs and programs that it must accommodate, the desires and expectations that each community projects onto a space, and the unforeseeable and random components that the contemporary world always throws up.
This book shows that there is no single way to face reality, and architectural projects cannot be approached with prefabricated answers. One can only build an approach incrementally, edging towards an architectural interpretation with sensitivity.
This exploration takes us to very different places. These include environments dominated by the imposing nature of the mountainside, as with the projects Malga Fosse Mountain Hut (2012), Bivouac Fanton (2015), and Petrarca Mountain Hut (2015); the interface with the historic city and its urban heritage, as with the Town Hall in Gembloux (2009), Palazzo Carcano Courthouse in Trani (2021), Foro Italico Tennis Stadium in Rome (2022), and the Library in Geneva (2023); or getting to grips with outlying districts, offering unresolved and complex areas, such as the Financial Police Offices in Bologna (2018), the NOI Techpark B2 in Bolzano (2018), the Fire Station in Lecco (2019), and City of Justice in Bologna (2023).
Each place and geography teaches us to construct an open and very specific process, using architecture as a tool for understanding and amplifying the environmen-
tal conditions that both reflect and affect the emotional sphere of reality.
What also emerges in this book are our links with other scholars and professionals with whom we constantly collaborate and discuss; authors who are essential for us to understand our own path and to move our architectural research forward through complex contexts. We have attempted to analyze our various areas of research by calling on five authors with whom we have an understanding and an ongoing relationship to write critical texts that explore theoretical considerations on key projects.
These architectures marked moments in which our research found its synthesis. Some are works still in progress, but we believe it is meaningful to show various stages of our ideational process, moments where the transfiguration of thought is still in a stage of potential mutation, related to the technique and materiality inherent in the construction process. A key element then emerges: almost all of these projects are public works; they are thus places that interact directly with the social context and attempt to establish an active relationship, providing contact to both the human and artificial surroundings.
The visual dimension of the book was designed in relation to the theory behind our work, the idea of the resonance of the context with human presence. This choice was also fueled by our collaboration and dialogue with Iwan Baan, an auteur who has explored the territories of our research in the field. His aerial photographs capture the deep architectural presence within these contexts. We believe them
to be revealing images, helping us better understand the interactions between life, nature, and designed space.
Architecture and Projects in Complex Contexts is a book that aspires to construct a journey through the world of spatial transformation, a quest that embraces the struggle between the control of architectural design and its imperfect evolution into reality.
We believe every research project feeds on its own creators, and so this book addresses the works themselves but also the collaboration and open debate that took place among us during each project. It talks about spatial moments, but most of all about the complexity of places and those who wish to transform and protect them in an attempt to ensure architecture remains a sensitive and unpredictably emotional undertaking.
Bivouac Fanton, 2015
Marmarole
The Marmarole is a wild and impervious mountain range, and the pass where this bivouac hut is located is a sprawling space lying 2,667 meters above sea level, in a setting defined by rock, light, wind, snow, and distance.
Architecture at high altitude takes on an extreme meaning, in which everything appears to expand in the perception of the extended space. Emotionally, opposing demands emerge, such as the desire to explore and move through this space and the need to protect oneself and take refuge, to rediscover a human dimension.
Bivouac Fanton is a project of proportions between the absolute and the measured, a minute work that finds its dimensions in its scope for amplifying perceptions. Inhabiting it means placing oneself between the lenses of a telescope; it is an attempt to frame space, to circumscribe it, to make it a work of connection between man and the environment, to define a caesura capable of imposing a provisional boundary on the landscape, a kind of progressive compression of rocks, light, wind, and snow.
It is an unstable balance, one embodied in the internal space of the work; a wooden belly that cushions the impact of harsh nature, then the fiberglass that thickens layer upon layer, like a second skin, serving simultaneously as shell and structure.
It is a volume defined by nature, an architecture characterized by a strongly inclined profile that adapts to the orography of the Marmarole. A section that maintains its strong value in its interior space, becoming its generating element, organizing the interior space upwards along the longitudinal axis, thus generating an axis that binds the site to the Auronzo Valley.
Fanton, Marmarole
Fanton, Marmarole
Bivouac Fanton, Marmarole
Interview Petra Blaisse
Petra’s introduction and questions to DEMOGO about Bivouac Fanton
Being from Holland, I naturally am fascinated by mountainous landscapes in all their grandeur, danger, and beauty. And having experienced many different altitudes and weather conditions in the Alps in different seasons as a passionate skier, hiker, nature lover, and (hobby) photographer, I was immediately excited when DEMOGO told me about this project. I fell totally in love with it when I saw the photographs that Iwan took: the grand expanse, steep mountainsides rising against gray skies, endless stretches of bare rock and rubble with its subtle colorless nuances and sharp shadows, the sheer bleakness and steepness of the place!
Then, suddenly, you see it: that tiny rectangular block, that seemingly fragile structure that seems about to slide off to its demise.
There it is, courageously standing firm, facing the harshest conditions while offering protection, rest, and amazing views to people after a difficult and exhausting journey. I want to go there tomorrow!
PB: Who was your client and how did the contact come about?
DMG: The client is the local section of CAI* (Club Alpino Italiano), a group of volunteers from the village of Auronzo di Cadore in the Dolomites that formed an association to enhance the mountain experience. Since its foundation in 1863, CAI has always endeavored to promote the culture of the mountains and to create protective structures for people who wish to explore and inhabit these complex places.
As far back as 1969 they attempted to carry a small, prefabricated bivouac by helicopter to the top of the mountain (2,667 meters above sea level). This attempt failed due to severe weather conditions, and the US military helicopter that attempted the feat abandoned the bivouac at 1,775 meters.
In 2014 CAI organized a design competition for a new bivouac at the Forcella* Marmarole notch. The competition attracted 273 entries, and a jury of seven people chose ours as the winning project. The outcome was made public in March 2015.
PB: How did they formulate the program for this refuge?
DMG: CAI asked for a minimalist building, a place of refuge for climbers. The tender stipulated 12 beds, an area for eating, and space to store backpacks and boots. They also added many technical specifications related to climate: a building capable of withstanding large amounts of snow and strong winds that blow rubble against the outside skin, and it should remain visible and reachable even with two meters of snow on the ground. These requirements confronted us with the paradox of having to design a building that was both highly resistant yet very light, so as to be transportable by helicopter at high altitude.
PB: What was the budget and timeline for this undertaking?
DMG: The budget was very low at first but later increased to about € 300,000, including the helicopter transportation costs. The timeline was not strictly defined, as the weather conditions at the site and the manner by which the client would raise the money were still unknown. But, of course, they managed in the end.
PB: How did the project evolve?
DMG: Between 2015 and 2017 we developed all the drawings and obtained the necessary permits. Construction began on-site in October 2017 with, as predicted, many difficulties due to bad weather, snow, and logistical problems with the helicopter. In early 2020 we made the fiberglass canopy structure in a shipyard in Tunisia, which arrived by ship to Genoa and was then transported by truck to the village of Auronzo di Cadore.
In September 2020 a helicopter lifted the bivouac from the village (866 m) to Forcella Marmarole (2,667 m).
In the summer of 2021 we completed the wooden interior and the zinc-titanium outer skin, its parts prefabricated in the valley and then assembled at high altitude, while all the window frames and fixed glass panels were fitted before the flight. Everything was transported to the site using an Airbus AS 350: a helicopter that can carry a load of around 700 kg at high altitude.
Finally, on August 28, 2021, we inaugurated the small bivouac with an ascent to the Forcella Marmarole, together with the Auronzo di Cadore community.
PB: Can you give a more specific location of the bivouac; a scientific formula of its location?
DMG: The Forcella Marmarole is part of the Dolomite mountains. It is crossed by the Alta Via No. 5, a very demanding alpine path with complicated passages that starts in Sesto and ends in Pieve di Cadore.
It takes seven days to walk the entire Alta Via. The path is 90 km long and has a total height difference between ascent and descent of 11,800 meters.
The bivouac’s geographic coordinates are 46.5057576, 12.3427454.
PB: Were there other parties involved as advisers—like specific engineers, mountaineers, guides, medical specialists?
DMG: The project was highly experimental, so we needed to acquire knowledge from many different specialists; knowledge that we then had to consolidate and integrate in the design. For example, the body acts like an upside-down boat and is made of fiberglass and carbon fiber, so we had to ask a naval engineer for the necessary calculations, and a company that manufactures nautical products to produce it. On the other hand, the steel structures and ground anchorages of the bivouac were designed by Franzoso Ingegneria, who were able to maintain our idea of a minimal central support. Then we collaborated with the local Gruppo Soccorso Alpino (Mountain Rescue Group) and Elifriulia, the helicopter transport company, both because of their professional experience in managing safety and logistics in the high mountains. Heliswiss International transported the bivouac to altitude, and together with their team we designed the anchorages to keep the building at the right angle so that it would land correctly on the steel platform and avoid sliding down the mountain slope.
We also involved experts in materials and construction techniques, firms such as Soprema that saw the project as a technical experiment and a challenge. They took care of the thermal insulation of the building, providing it free of charge because they consider the bivouac project as a laboratory of climate and architectural performance.
PB: How was the professional knowledge of your own studio applied during this project?
DMG: Naturally, we had to learn a lot, first during the competition but also during the executive project itself. We were confronted with many complications stemming from both site and climate. When it came to developing the wooden interior, we had to invent new ways to fit it precisely against the outer skin. We made a 3D scan of the bivouac shell before transportation, then produced three-dimensional digital models of the interior with a CNC machine. We discussed every joint in detail with the carpenters, and finally controlled the production process via the CNC machine. We also designed the boxes in which the parts were transported by helicopter, dividing the loads in a functional way.
The works on-site were meticulously planned, because you only have a few days (if weather allows) and you are far away from everything and everyone, so you are aware of the risk of forgetting something or of something going wrong. This experience taught us a lot about plan-
Fanton, Marmarole
First-floor plan
2021 Palazzo Carcano Courthouse, Trani
Palazzo Carcano Courthouse, Trani
