The project is the winning competition entry for the restoration of palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, the famous renaissance building designed by Biagio Rossetti, and the realization of a new pavilion in the rear garden, necessary to close the exhibition itinerary (the Palazzo is missing its fourth side).
The project for the new exhibition pavilion, which represents the physical and symbolic hearth of the project, generates an interplay with the context of the Palazzo through different strategies:
Shape and geometry
The pavilion bases its formal matrix on the same geometrical logic that structures the Palazzo, a choice that allows the new intervention – otherwise different in its formal language and materialization – to become part of the evolutionary logic of the existing building.
A system of voids and massed
The new intervention is consistent with the spatial structure of the Palazzo and it is characterized by an alternation of massed and voids: by leaving a space between the new building and the wall that frames the sixteenth-century courtyard is created that enriched the already abundant spatial sequence.
A wall as threshold
Therefore, the role attributed to the ancient wall that separates the courtyard from the garden is of central importance. Distancing the new building from the existing wall has allowed the preservation of its status as a threshold, an element of transition from one void into another: first the geometrical and controlled space of the inner courtyard, followed by the more natural space of the garden.
Client: City of Ferrara
Location: Ferrara, Italy
Program: Exhibition spaces
Year: 2017-2018
Status: Scheme design
Dimension: 650 mq
This project is work of Labics, the firm directed by Maria Claudia Clemente and Francesco Isidori, and can be found here:
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
