Time flows, everything changes. The appearance of places and even their intended use change. A huge courtyard building, originally owned by a rich landowner of the village of Simala (Or), looks out onto the main street, Via Roma, with many spaces and buildings needed for the farming activity. A house, the hearth that has kept domestic intimacy within its walls, in compliance with the basic principles of traditional Sardinian architecture, so protective and introvert, magically transforms itself into its opposite: an internal square, an exhibition area.
A privileged area, helped by the central position within a valuable historical centre, enclosed by high walls and devoted to expose and give value to local products. At this point the choices of the architect, in line with the superintendence authority and the regional service of landscape protection, proceed towards the same direction: preserve the historical walls and build the courtyard flooring guaranteeing its permeability. This direction has taken and embodied the lesson of the great minds who had the honour to confront themselves with pre-existence, taking inspiration from the draws of Piranesi and the crack of Burri. The starting situation was quite discouraging: an intricate maze of vegetation that made impossible even noticing the built areas. After the cleaning up, deep and cathartic, the project idea emerged.
The aim has been to head towards the evocative power of the ruins. The suggestion they keep tells what they have been and predict the unexpressed and exploding power of what they are going to be. In addition, the purpose is to give nobility to these walls and make them stand out, together with what remained of the everyday life of a residential building. Thus, as with the ruins of medieval Sardinian castles, the intent is to create a memory of the work and of the simple and common lives that those walls hosted and protected. Creating a scenario, making the wall become a backstage, and a stage of what remains of the house. A square, a public place that enters a private place, where life was hidden from outside curiosity. Thus, thanks to the simplicity, stealing from the passing time and keeping what remained, the iconic aspect of the walls and the minimal setting up has been enhanced, in preparation to the correct valorisation of what will be exhibited.
A semantic translation of the linearity of existences, of the agricultural work, of the continuity with which the earth continues to offer its fruits. The spacial dimension, often fundamental in the interpretative process of the trace as a significant event, takes on a central importance if we consider the indexical nature of it, its material relation with the space that indicates, and which gives meaning to, reactivating the latent memories that the space preserved.
The priority objective becomes the creation of an essential and evocative scenario and the focus moves to the techniques needed to get it. Burri’s poetics in his work in Gibellina has been the guiding light towards which converge on the processing of the fundamental elements which constitute the space: the courtyard and the walls. The horizontal and vertical planes. The work on the courtyards (horizontal elements) has kept the modalities used on the old open spaces with the typical “impedrau” (stones) flooring, and a stone permeable floor has been set inside the old residential rooms.
During the cleaning operations and removal of the ruins, a portion of an old flooring made of “tellas” (stone slabs) has emerged inside the building. It has been renovated with the use of the old stones. Respecting permeability, rain water can pass through all the floorings. The flooring of the rooms inside is made up of basalt slabs placed with large grout lines on a grit sand bed which allows passing water to be received by a net of drain tubes. A plain which is intended to become the stage of the new urban square, an exhibition space that will host events for typical products and slow tourism, two activities that are more and more strengthening the role of the village, with interesting positive consequences on its economy.
This stage will be surrounded by the element that mainly characterizes the project, introducing a poetic element inspired by the Land Art work of Burri: wall ruins. Walls have been cleaned, secured, plastered and painted with ecological materials made from lime. The final result is a protection veil put on the fragile vertical elements. First of all it underlines and preserves the absence; depriving, it emphasizes the wall ruins, their simplicity as a manifesto of the life that they have guarded, of the farming culture now irremediably lost.
This abstraction work can recreate a memory whose universal characters form the archetype of the backstage space, of the place of representation and exposition. A minimal work that has tried, starting from a setting inspired by art and poetry, to bring back in a public space the memory of the agricultural work allowing its transformation into an exposition space for the same products in a minimal but welcoming context.
