Transforming the Palazzetto dello Sport in via Pitentino into a museum of modern and contemporary art, able to intercept the new languages and new forms of art, without carrying out radical demolitions and with an ambitious vision of the cultural future of the city: Bergamo City Council the planning permission and Listed Building Consent for the retrofit of GAMeC Museum in Bergamo, the Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery of the city, for years now looking for a new location.
The ambitious urban plan continues, aiming at re-functionalizing the old sports hall of the city, a sports facility that will be replaced by the new Palazzo dello Sport which will rise in place of the Palacreberg and the 6500 Arena under construction in the new Chorus Life complex, which the COSTIM group is building between via Serassi and via Bianzana.
The intervention will have a total cost of around 18 million euros, of which over 6 million from the PNRR - as part of the urban regeneration tender -, another 6 million promised in 2017 by the UBI Banca Popolare Foundation. The start of the construction site is expected after the close of the next sports season, in the spring of 2023: the detailed design of the structure will be carried out in the coming months, the European tender procedures required by the regulations will follow and finally the assignment of the works.
"The transformation project of the current Palazzetto dello Sport - Giorgio Gori, Mayor of Bergamo - realizes the ambition to make the GAMeC a point of reference of international importance for modern and contemporary art, providing it with a functional location both for large exhibitions for workshops, conferences and educational activities. The project makes use of a significant contribution from the Ubi Foundation, which we would like to thank, and is part of the most extensive qualification of an entire quadrant of the city. It should therefore be read together with the regeneration of the Montelungo barracks and the Stadium, the expansion of the Suardi Park and the opening to the public of the Orti di San Tomaso, with the restructuring of the Prince of Naples and the creation of a cycle-pedestrian path that from the Sentierone you arrive at the new GAMeC and at the Carrara Academy: all in the name of culture and free time, as foreseen by the 2010 PGT ”.
As for the structure, the current shape of the sports facility will be maintained (a distinctive feature of a building) which, however, demonstrates its entire half-century of life. The stands will be demolished and a large "lantern" will be built inside - which will contain the exhibition part - through the construction of intermediate floors and exploiting the height of the current playing field. In addition to this new container, a restaurant, a bar, a bookshop and all the functional services of an art gallery are also planned. The total area will almost triple: from the current 2,200 square meters to just under 6,000.
Confirming and clearing the elliptical container from the additional volumes and maintaining the position of the entrance towards piazzale Oberdan, the project transforms the current forepart, maintains its grounds and lowers it in height in order to build a portal that allows public space to “flow” inside the building. This creates the museum foyer, a full-height internal covered square, an open space, attractive and in harmony with the new external square, designed by seats, a fountain with water games and small commercial gazebos.
The museum's exhibition area will actually begin on the ground floor: the full-height foyer is designed as a multifunctional space equipped for exhibiting large-scale works. This space also houses the bookshop and informal educational rooms to attract the younger audience. Opposite the entrance are the museum offices and a commercial space that overlooks the new student residence in the Montelungo-Colleoni area.
A central staircase excavates the entrance to the museum on the first and second level with the gallery for permanent exhibitions, obtained, this, inside the opal volume that presents a series of mobile modular panels customizable at necessity. The permanent museum and temporary gallery are however accessible separately so as not to hinder access to the permanent museum during the setting up of temporary exhibitions. Safety stairs and symmetrically positioned elevators complete the system of accessibility and escape routes.
On the top floor it was necessary to reduce the volume due to the impossibility of building adjacent to the passage of the Morla stream. A light volume was therefore created that houses a panoramic restaurant, accessible from the outside even when the museum is closed. The new volume follows the building boundary, leaving the rest of the space to a rooftop panoramic terrace.
The new museum will therefore also represent a new point of view on Bergamo, thanks to this panoramic terrace that overlooks the roofs of the city and is the conclusion of this path that winds through the memory of the building, inside art, and then finally to see the city.
"The design of a new GAMeC, - explains the director Lorenzo Giusti - larger, brighter, more welcoming and more suitable for hosting the multiple languages of the contemporary is a goal consistent with the growth of art collections and with the increase progressive number of the public that has interested the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bergamo from its establishment in 1991 - exactly thirty years ago - until today. The presence of a contemporary museum in architectural forms, as well as in the substance of its activities, can contribute significantly to strengthening the identity profile of a productive, industrious city, devoted to innovation and cultural experimentation, open to investigation and 'in-depth study of the great issues of our time and projected towards the future. "
Enhancing the potential of the existing structure and paying attention to the issues of soil consumption, circularity and sustainability, the architects Carlo Cappai and Maria Alessandra Segantini, founding partners and directors of C+S Architects (Treviso and London), opted for a retrofit operation. “We have inherited from the past buildings of generous dimensions and structures that today we can rarely afford to build. We believe it is necessary to enhance existing buildings and obsolete urban systems because they are special spaces available to communities, banks of energy and raw materials, resources to regenerate parts of the city, rather than problem to be solved. Retrofit is a resilient tool to translate the more or less recent past and turn it into a resource for the community. The transformation of the sports hall into the GAMeC Museum is one of these legacies that is transformed into potential, on the urban scale, on the architectural scale and on the scale of the physical experience of citizens. "- Segantini emphasizes.
"The project becomes a bridge between past and future: on the one hand it maintains a strong trace of the original structures and, on the other, it invents a new space, consisting of an opal glass lantern suspended in the void that houses the permanent GaMeC gallery. The existing internal structures will be left unfinished and consolidated with metal grafts maintaining the materiality of the exposed concrete and the traces of its transformations to build a dialogue between old and new”, underlines Cappai.
"We are honored to have contributed to giving back to the citizens of Bergamo a new public space capable of raising awareness of the fundamental role that art and culture have in building the legacy for future generations", write Cappai and Segantini.
And it is this placing oneself first of all on the scale of the city one of the strengths of this project and its destination, in one of the areas that will see one of the most radical transformations of the city in the coming years, with the new interventions planned on the Montelungo barracks, intended as a university site, and the enlargement of the Suardi park with the acquisition of the gardens of San Tomaso and the redevelopment of the former Canossiane. These new transformations are accompanied by the presence of one of the most important cultural institutions in the city, such as the nearby Accademia Carrara.
The project of the new GAMeC is part of this renewal, perhaps becoming, for its very purpose, one of the main emblems and fundamental element of the hinge between the student campus in the Ex-Caserma Montelungo-Colleoni, the Suardi park and the Carrara Academy. Aware of this role, the preliminary proposal is not only addressed to the building as such but, through various functional lots, extends the intervention also to the outside, in the urban space that surrounds it, providing for the construction of a new square to improve access to the same museum, obtained by moving the current parking lot towards the Borgo Santa Caterina intersection, without reducing the number of parking spaces existing today.
Other interventions involve the intersection with via della Muraine, in front of the old barracks and, on the opposite side, between via san Tomaso, Cesare Battisti and Borgo Santa Caterina, with the reconstruction of the flooring to better emphasize the mending of the parts that delimit and define them.
Therefore, not only the design of the building, this second version revisited due to a series of critical issues that emerged during the design process, becomes an opportunity to design a large quality urban public space and to connect a series of interventions through the new hinge urban area of the GAMeC.
"We have limited resources and less abundance of soil to consume, since the soil itself is a non-renewable resource," recalls the councilor for urban redevelopment Francesco Valesini. “We believe it is necessary to enhance existing buildings and obsolete urban systems because they are special spaces available to cities, resources rather than problems to be solved. The transformation of the sports hall into the new GAMeC is one of those legacies that transforms into potential, both on the urban and architectural scale, and which can make a decisive contribution to the enhancement of a part of the city ".
“The new GAMeC project - comments Nadia Ghisalberti, Councilor for culture - is the confirmation of the renewed ambitions of a city that is betting on culture for its post-pandemic covid19 relaunch. The GAMeC - which in 2020 was able to adapt to the pandemic crisis with new and innovative initiatives that also earned it the recognition of museum of the year for the Giornale dell'Arte and director of the year for ArtTribune - and, with this future location, will be able to best express all the new languages of art, releasing the further potential that this cultural institution has shown to have under the direction of Lorenzo Giusti. "
