Villa Baroncina - Genius Loci, the spirit of the place.
According to the modern definition of Genius Loci, or spirit of a place, the way that man relates to the landscape through construction, and thus identifies his ‘place in the world’, is for Mediterranean countries called ‘Classical’, or, precisely, ‘Mediterranean’. (C.N. Schulz, Genius Loci, Rizzoli, 1979).
Characterised by hilly or gentle foothills, with important references to seas, lakes and valleys, the conformation of the Classical territory is revealed through artefacts that tend to emphasise its conformation, such as temples/castles/towers/churches on hilltops, fortified villages perched or on the flanks of reliefs, and ridge buildings. These are all elements that mark the space for human dwelling, making it perceived as 'ours' and faceting its richness.
The Villa Baroncina is a typical example of a mark on the territory as a classical intervention, through a dominant building that does not ‘subjugate’ nature but marks it, a ridge building that, once built, helps to identify the ridge itself, making us perceive it as such and revealing the spatial values of the valleys below. The entire territory of Ome/Monticelli/Provaglio is built in this way, with a series of ‘pivotal’ buildings and small hamlets that mark the territory, identifying it. The Church of Calzana, S. Zenone and the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Rosa and, further on, the church of Provezze, up to more recent examples such as the stately villas of Fantecolo. And the Villa Baroncina itself.
The noble Renaissance building is no less tied to the territory than the perched and winding medieval villages. Both authentically mark the classic territory by showing its conformation and space.
The characteristic elements of the Baroncina site are the ridge line of the hill and the system of terracing with which the hill is organised. The villa has an orientation, a layout, that is dictated more by the morphology of the place than by the orientation of the sun. It is not oriented to the south as it would be if it were built on the plain. It is built around the double porch/lobby facing south, but with a direction that is actually a full south-east, probably dictated by the conformation of the land, so as to ensure a ‘laying plane’ of the building's ground floor as horizontal as possible, much more so than by exposure to the sun. The building's way of marking the ridge is twofold: firstly, with its mass it marks the position of the passage on the ‘Dosso Baiana’ between the Monticelli and Ome valleys; secondly, in a more subtle manner, it ‘marks’ the ridge through the noble entrance road to the villa itself, which is located exactly on the ridge itself, departing from the road that climbs from the village in a much more southerly position with respect to the villa itself, and which, ideally continued southwards, coincides with the southern, and more natural, part of the ridge. In other words, the entrance to the Baroncina is the sign, physical and perceptive, of the building's presence on the ridge and the surrounding space.
This sign also continues upstream of the building, in a physical manner today, with the passageway next to the villa ascending upstream as a sign in the field, but in the past as a more marked passageway to the point that, like the villa and like the noble entrance road, it was already highlighted in the Napoleonic Land Register. This ‘sign system’ is neither parallel nor perpendicular to the villa, but arranged along the ridge. This reciprocal geometry between villa and route allows the overall ‘built’ system to lie on the site, identifying with it in an inseparable manner.
Our Project
The guidelines of the design approach directly relate to this sense of place and, possibly, tend to further emphasise its character, going further, in this sense, to define the entire space behind the villa.
The project envisages an extension aimed at transforming the existing structure into a residence for the elderly, for approximately 36 guests, whose aggregative spaces also house a day centre for the elderly for up to 10 users.
Even after the extension, the villa remains the pivotal and nodal element of the entire intervention area. All the extension volumes will be placed upstream of the villa, so that the relationship between the building and its main façade and the landscape will not be lost in any way. The new volumes are placed in such a way that they are only partially perceived as such, and partially as a landscape modelling intervention. In particular, the pavilions of the sleeping rooms are placed at the level of the first floor of the villa and oriented according to the ridge line, forming a visual telescope centred on the ridge itself.
The new entrance to the complex is from upstream, through a glazed distributive element that immediately makes the geometry of the entire complex, the villa, the ridge line and the valleys below, perceptible.
The aggregative spaces of the facility, which also house the day care centre, are located on the lower level and oriented according to the hillside, so as to guarantee the greatest possible enjoyment of the landscape from within, so that the guests of the house can constantly participate in the evolution of the natural and anthropic elements of the landscape itself throughout the course of the year, following the course of the seasons and the weather. Their location is therefore primarily aimed at this function. In the same way, such an approach to the project will allow guests to remain connected to those natural and anthropic elements of the landscape that have most likely been the very ‘witnesses’ of their lives, such as the churches of the various hamlets, the aforementioned Sanctuary Hill, and the historic hamlets of the villages. The relational link between the dwelling places of the past and the dwelling place of senility will not be entirely lost and will always tend to favour important memory processes.
All rooms have direct access to the external spaces, which are differentiated between a series of courtyards, porticoes, and terraced gardens.
The intervention can also be seen as a reinforcement of the urban fabric, which thus establishes relationships similar to those of the historic settlements in the area, with buildings in close proximity, intimate outdoor urban environments, and all those qualities that have always given humanity to the historic centres of Italian and European cities. This concept can be summed up with the theme ‘the sense of the village’, or of the core, given the place where it is built.
The architectural language of the extension is contemporary. By contemporary we mean the search for a language more in keeping with our century and which goes beyond classical modernism (post-war buildings in particular) and post-modern approaches to design (edification of ‘historical fakes’ or in any case the revival of historicist languages), unifying in an architectural language, albeit with modern detailing, all the constructional and typological approaches of the architecture of the past built in the cultural region of the intervention.
The lines are simple and devoid of ornamentation, but the materials move towards naturalness, through the use of warm, striated plastered surfaces (made with rammed-earth), and through the moderate but strongly characterising use of thin, light marble elements for the colummns of the arcades.
