Castel del Piano, Italy
Alice Gardini and Nicola Gibertini from GGA together with landscape architect Kristof Huysecom led the design for this new villa surrounded by an olive grove in the foothills of Amiata Mount in the Tuscan Maremma.
Raised off the ground, the building is presented as a pavilion released to the landscape in a theatrical way: a proscenium.
It’s a spatial mechanism for admiring the surrounding nature claiming its belonging to the place and to its secular history.
HVP is a typical Mediterranean architecture facing the issue of a residence in its more archaic typological and construction principles.
Eight structural boxes settled on a reinforced concrete platform support the solid stone floor covering.
The spaces in the house are geometrically configured around a central patio of Roman-Italic reminiscence: “Atrium Tusculanum.”
The interior is just structure and raw materials aimed at celebrating the contemporary approach to detail solutions.
The floor is made of cementitious resin and it has the color of sun-scorched grass in the warmer months and chestnut leaves in autumn.
Natural wood completes the volumes and all the furnishings are customized.
A steel kitchen island and a monumental cast-in-place cement table celebrate the rite of good Italian cuisine emphasizing the convivial character of the house.
The table is the secular altar in the center of the visible scene from every room in the house.
The facility is a spatial continuum between the intimate hearth and the olive grove without blackout filtering elements except for the light linen curtains.
Outside the rigor of geometry is compact and cohesive in proportions and it honors the local country building tradition of “dry stone” walls on anthropized soil, whereas the wood infills recall the locking elements of the animating traditional rural buildings called “seccatoi”—dryers for chestnuts.
In this way, the building merges with the landscape and ties it profoundly into its own history.
Project: HV Pavillon
Architects: GGA gardini gibertini architetti
Design Team: Alice Gardini, Nicola Gibertini, Luigi Lupini, and Giada Spano
Landscape Architects: Kristof Huysecom
Structural Engineers: Studio Silvagni
General Contractor: AC Costruzioni
Client: Private
Photographers: Ezio Manciucca
