The reconversion of a public building, restoring hierarchies with a sharp addition that opens up new interactions.

 
 

Cavezzo Town Hall

location: Cavezzo (Modena) Italy
client: Cavezzo Municipality 
status: 2014 competition, 2nd prize
consultants: Joao Nunes-Proap (landscape design consultant), Cavazzoni Associati (plants engineering)
collaborators: Lucia Del Monte, Francesco Gasperini, Alessandro Molesini 
program: reconversion of the old shool building into municipal offices

 

 

Hardly hit by an earthquake, the city of Cavezzo does not just need to rebuild the places of the collectivity, but also and above all of interventions that symbolically represent the rebirth and revival of public life and the activities of the country. We therefore chose to insert itself into the logic of a broader process involving spaces public and public centers of the inhabited center, so that the proposed project is a part of a great design. The location of the new municipal headquarters in the former building school Media Dante Alighieri, in front of Piazza Martiri, is already a decisive choice in this direction. First step of the overview, can assume a new and innovative symbolic value with great evidence, immediate visibility and clear usability. Our project wants to make its own and give shape to these requests and expectations.

The overturning of the access system in the former school building (previously located along via Dante Alighieri and via Vittorio Veneto) turning them towards Piazza Martiri, then becomes the key to a new system of relations between spaces and functions public. In this way and without any external transformation of the bound building, it completely changes the sense of a building that is born introverted and placed on a level raised, then closed in itself and perched as the buildings were once built school. Today the transformation into municipal structure, administrative machine and Political representation of Cavezzo, requires a change of perspective compared to the pre-existing building that literally translates into the connection and in the direct and unmediated view towards Piazza Martiri.