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S.Giuseppe church renovation

description
Competion proposal for renovation and transformation of S.Giuseppe church in Amatrice (RI) in a cultural centre

The new cultural center to be built on the site of the church of St. Joseph in the historic center of Amatrice is conceived as an effective device in combining the needs of preservation and enhancement of urban memory with an intervention of contemporary architecture appropriate to the insertion in the context, the purposes of the RDP and at the same time to the new uses.

In the belief that memory is an intention and that, in a general reconstruction operation, the complementarity of times and languages that usually composes the character of our country’s small historic centers is irreproducible, the appropriate design scope of the intervention is defined.

The new cultural center reproposes the original volumetry of the Baroque church, with two lower side wings (eave elevation 8 meters) and a higher central body (eave elevation 12.5 meters). The building thus qualifies as a kind of “apparition” and re-proposition of the original articulations of the building in relation to the surrounding urban space and especially to Corso Umberto, while resorting to a kind of abstraction of language that restores the articulations of volumes on a single plane, renouncing the overhangs and molded decorations typical of a given historical period.

In memory of the original location of the central body, projecting from the side bodies towards Corso Umberto, a portion of the original masonry remains, appropriately consolidated and integrated into the new building.

The memory of the original site is thus activated through a series of arrangements that use original elements, the heights of the building bodies and the fragments of the masonry and stone decorations of the forometries, as active elements in a recomposition of evocative character that finds its fulfillment in an abstract language of contemporary qualification. The original volumetric reproposition of the church will counterpoint an organization of the interior spaces that, through the articulation in sections, will ensure a strong relationship in visual continuity of the exhibition spaces between the ground and first floors.