Le Villette del Villaggio Eni di Borca di Cadore
(text by Anna De Salvador, translation by Anna Dal Pont)
It was 1954 when the architect Edoardo Gellner found in the southern side of Mount Antelao the perfect scenario for the construction of the holiday Village of the Eni group, whose head was, at the time, Enrico Mattei.
The Village’s conception is an operation that, in the eyes of the visionary entrepreneur has, above all, a social value. The establishment was to become a medium, a link, between the hydrocarbons-producing company and the rest of the world: a representative place which was going to express the ideas of progress and modernity that were Eni’s signature in the 50s. Mattei identifies in Gellner the most suitably personality to give voice to these planning requirements.
Edoardo Gellner, born in Abbazia in 1909, carried out his studies in Vienna and Venice, where he graduated in architecture in 1945. Among his mentors Josef Hoffmann, leading figure of the Vienna Secession, and Carlo Scarpa, Venetian architect and designer. The opportunities of the post WWII period took Gellner to Cortina, and there he became an expert in architecture on mountain sites, a role that was going to give him the chance to experience as an active participant the buzz linked with the 1956 Winter Olympics.
The trust that Mattei placed in Gellner allowed the architect to plan his project using an architectural register which didn’t formally evoke the rustic architecture of a mountain area: he expressed innovation instead, morphing the construction site into a downright technological lab. The result is an urban workshop, architectural and structural, which offers numerous solutions to different planning scopes.
THE COTTAGES
Each one of the 270 cottages was designed to house a family, and their several different configurations were going to allow a comfortable stay to families made up of different numbers of members. Gellner not only worked out the typological and structural solutions of the houses, but also examined in depth the planning of the interiors, of the movable and unmovable furniture: pieces made serially, sturdy and easy to maintain.
The cottages are scattered in the woods, none of them prevails on the other, they all have to guarantee both the privacy of family life and the possibility of living moments of communal gathering at the same time. To avoid defacement of the landscape and to gain an optimal view of Mount Pelmo, Gellner managed to obtain from Mattei permission to bury all wiring. The cottages seem to be built on piles, with load-bearing partition walls made of decorated cement embedded to the ground, prebuilt elements which support the mono-pitched roof and the large horizontal glass walls which guarantee ample brightness inside. The result is a constellation of small, low, elongated houses perfectly in harmony with the surrounding landscape.
(scheda a cura di Anna De Salvador)
E' il 1954 quando l'architetto Edoardo Gellner individua nel versante sud del Monte Antelao lo scenario per la costruzione del Villaggio vacanze del Gruppo Eni, presieduto allora da Enrico Mattei.
L'ideazione del Villaggio è un'operazione che, agli occhi del lungimirante imprenditore, ha soprattutto una valenza sociale. L'insediamento dovrà essere un medium fra la società di idrocarburi e il resto del mondo: un luogo di rappresentanza che esprima le idee di progresso e di modernità proprie di Eni negli anni cinquanta. Mattei individua in Gellner la figura adatta per dare voce a queste esigenze progettuali.
Edoardo Gellner, nato ad Abbazia nel 1909, studia a Vienna e Venezia, dove si laurea in architettura nel 1945. Fra i suoi maestri Josef Hoffmann, esponente di spicco della Secessione viennese e Carlo Scarpa, architetto e designer veneziano. Le opportunità del primo dopoguerra portano Gellner a Cortina, qui diventa uno specialista dell'architettura di montagna, ruolo che gli permetterà di vivere da protagonista il fermento legato alle olimpiadi invernali del 1956.
La fiducia che Mattei ripone in Gellner permette all'architetto di progettare utilizzando un linguaggio
architettonico che non rievoca formalmente l'architettura rustica di montagna: esprime l'innovazione trasformando il cantiere in un vero e proprio laboratorio tecnologico. Il risultato è un'officina urbanistica, architettonica e strutturale che offre svariate soluzioni a differenti scale progettuali.
LE VILLETTE
Ognuna delle 270 villette era pensata per ospitare una famiglia e le svariate tipologie avrebbero consentito il soggiorno a nuclei familiari composti da un differente numero di persone. Gellner non solo studia la soluzione tipologica e strutturale delle case ma approfondisce anche la progettazione degli interni, degli arredi fissi e mobili: pezzi realizzabili in serie, ad alta resistenza e di facile manutenzione.
Le villette sono sparse nel bosco, nessuna prevale sulle altre, devono garantire nello stesso tempo la privacy della vita familiare e la possibilità di vivere dei momenti di aggregazione. Per non deturpare il paesaggio e per avere una visuale ottimale sul monte Pelmo, Gellner ottiene da Mattei il permesso di interrare tutti gli impianti elettrici. Le case sembrano costruite su palafitte, con setti portanti in cemento decorato radicati al suolo, elementi prefabbricati che sostengono il tetto a falda unica e grandi vetrate orizzontali che garantiscono una forte luminosità. Il risultato è una costellazione di casette basse e allungate in perfetta sintonia con l'andamento del terreno e con il paesaggio circostante.
ABOUT PROGETTOBORCA
Progettoborca is a project of cultural enhancement and functional rethinking of the former Eni Village of Borca di Cadore, launched in July 2014 by Dolomiti Contemporanee.
Dolomiti Contemporanee (DC) is a project born in 2011 in the Dolomiti-UNESCO area.
DC, visual arts lab on location, is a contemporary art and cultural innovation “construction site” project.
DC works for the re-activation of abandoned sites, industrial archaeology compounds, factories that have been shut down, in the Dolomiti-UNESCO region. These underutilized resources, which politics, governments, and economy have been unable to rehabilitate in conventional ways for years, decades, become the construction sites of a regenerative, re-functionalizing project based on culture and art, strategies and networks.
The sites in which DC operates are selected on the basis of their quality, that is to say on the formal values of architecture, on their logistical, functional capabilities, and on the relationship with the environmental context: they’re all sites with exceptional qualities, charged with atmosphere and attraction: the one we intend to bring back to light.
Re-imagining them, however, isn’t enough to turn them back on; to obtain that result, DC continuously works on the enlargement of the strategic platforms of support to the project.
There are more than one hundred partners to date. They belong to various and different categories: institutional partners, public ones, private, productive, not to mention the cultural and artistic ones, several of them national and international in their reach.
Progettoborca stands to give new cultural value and offer a functional re-thinking of a site with an exceptional cultural and historical value: the Former Eni Village of Borca di Cadore, built in the tail end of the 50s by Enrico Mattei, as a vacation centre for Eni employees. A pioneering and unique business welfare experiment, in Italy, and absolutely innovative cultural workshop at the time.
It’s an exceptional and unique site, both from an architectural standpoint, in its relationship with the landscape, and in the vastness of the platform (big businesses, like Pirelli, Fantorni, Lanerossi, Krupp, Richard Ginori, work together to build it, realising parts for the site).
Since July 2014, DC has, indeed, started up an international artist residency inside the Village, with studios and ateliers, and the great, magnificent spaces by Gellner, drowned in the Dolomitic woods, have been transformed in a creative and artistic lab.
Together with the current owner of the site (Minoter-Cualbu Group), and a network of territorial subjects that gets bigger and bigger each day, a decisive action of enhancement and possible redefinition of this site and its connected parts (Colonia) today, was undertaken.
Progettoborca doesn’t intend to stand as the umpteenth evaluation (representation) of this site: we don’t want to go back to watch it but, finally, to begin an active process on it, working from the inside, culturally and strategically, imagining concrete and innovative reactivation models for it, a series of functions, a destiny that is, once more, active.
The regenerative construction site will continue throughout the next three years.
It integrates, as is the way in DC, the creative functions (art and culture) with the strategic ones, and with the ones linked to the handling and re-evaluation policy of the asset.
Periodically DC opens up the site with guided tours and open studios which enable visitors to get to know the Village and Progettoborca from the inside. These are the artists who, to this day, have worked in Progettoborca: Marco Andrighetto, Marta Allegri, Chiara Bergamo, Elisa Bertaglia, Gino Blanc, Stefano Cagol, Fabiano De Martin Topranin, Gianni De Val, Sandra Hauser, Jérémy Laffon, Stefano Moras, Luka Sirok.
Info on all the activities of Progettoborca can be found on the website www.progettoborca.net .