The project is set in a context which is very different from that European and western realities. The basic difficulty was that of coming down in this new reality; it has been that of searching and finding genuine, deep relationships whit these lands and places. Thus, the search for “genius loci” has gone beyond any visual perceptiveness, that is in search for the “hidden truths” of these lands. Object of our proposal, the project responds to this basic analysis. Far away from any easy sensationalism, the project presents itself, initially at least, like a monolithic, massive, unitary architecture. We believe, in fact, that the architecture and the Benetton building in such a case-beyond being a perfect functional machine, should even investigate a social, political, cultural function so becoming element of dialogue between different cultures that ever in such a case come to be rather antithetical, and thus assuming a role of balanced mediation between western culture and eastern culture, but without renouncing to its expressive identity.
We have tried to avoid an architecture unconnected with these places, packed somewhere else. From a planimetric point of view, the intervention raises along the whole perimeter of the lot, lime a full block, which is emptied in correspondence of the inner space where the light of large glazed surfaces come to light, a huge mass that is corroded from the natural forces and resolved in there great blocks of stones, so creating enormous inner “gorges” that will completely come to be glazed. It fallows that the project worms on the great contraposition between a well constructed, “silent” outside and an inner reality which is very dynamic and thundering; the whole work plays indeed on this fundamental “contradiction”.
