The intervention area, close to a S.I.C. area (Site of Community Interest), stands out on the skyline of the Aeolian Islands, at the center of a mythological-landscape context of notable cultural relevance. The particular constraints and landscape conditions, combined with the foresight of a client that we can define as enlightened, have allowed the design experimentation to be expanded in an unusual way to external and internal spaces, in an integral and integrated logic, almost mindful of the late modernist lesson " from the spoon to the city” by Ernesto Nathan Rogers.
In the face of a local construction tradition, defined by ancient residences that characterize the surrounding agricultural landscape with anthropic characteristics characterized and defined by a direct and unmediated view of the public road, the artefacts on which we intervene seem to have definitively lost any form of settlement memory .
Villa Mylae, in fact, was born from the renovation and recast of two pre-existing buildings, one in masonry from the late nineteenth century, carelessly remodeled over time, and the other in more recent reinforced concrete, created illegally and then remediated, and without any architectural connotation.
Methodologically, the intervention is concerned with "subtracting" rather than "adding", integrating and compensating the parts of the complex system of anthropic relationships in which we place ourselves. For this reason, the definition of the housing program has oriented towards a redevelopment of the two pre-existences while respecting their "differences", recovering the archaic lesson of "volumes under the sunlight".
The search for an identification with the values of "Mediterranean" living was articulated in a double plastic and constructive strategy, contrasting the "massive" character of the masonry construction with the "plasticity" of the reinforced concrete one. object of demo-reconstruction.
The recast project
The new and "abstract" plan of the facade of the masonry body is characterized by the insertion of an "empty" opening, by a system of steel moldings and by a lava stone strip which reinforces the "cantonal" exposed to the morning light of the 'East. The north-south extension of the stone façade recovers the lesson of the ancient local settlement relationship, strengthening the building's role as a landmark.
The silent volumetry of the reinforced concrete body demo-reconstructed, hosting the services and the master bedroom, it is instead compacted into the perfect stereotomy of a parallelepiped prism, articulated through actions of decomposition and cuts that open it to the landscape. The transparency of a shade, which protects the external staircase connecting to the terrace with its turning, characterizes the northern front of the building and its connection to the sky.
The two bodies are functionally reconnected by a small glass corridor which, like an umbilical cord, allows the passage from the older masonry building to the new reinforced concrete body: this passage is highlighted by the repositioning of the ancient stone portal of the masonry house, moved to mark the "threshold" of the new reconstructed volume.
The green space that surrounds the new residence on the south and west sides is characterized by the inclusion of a continuous lawn and thematic gardens. The system of earthen basins that gradually rises from the ground, containing layers of gravel, grassulaceous and aromatic plants, seeks a dialogue with the architectural lines of the intervention, integrating internal and external spaces. The few pre-existing trees were maintained and integrated into the new garden.
