Ascesa
Housing and Castle revalorisation
Castle Resort
Architecture idea competition organised by YAC
Credits : Benjamin Nicaud & Nicolas Pabion & Axel Burkhard
Roccamandolfi Castle, Italy, 2017
Honorable mention
The castle federates its site. Originally implanted for defensive war strategies, it embodies today a perched platform, devoted to the contemplation of a unique utopian landscape. Time and history have willed that the present morphology of ruin naturally offers a horizontal plateau, responding to its new role as a point of observation for the context.
Rather than selfishly invading this edifice like a parasite, our approach lies more in seeking to engage the entire territory and offer real added value to the site as a whole. Moreover, building on the castle certainly offers a beautiful clearance, but cut all relationship to the ruins, which would then be reduced to the state of base, socle, on which sits the new project. This would be like a chair on a chair.
This analysis leads us to seek fore a more noble relationship to the identity of the site, more involved in the territorial problematic of the location, which offers a greater potential for global requalification than the simple intervention on the ruins. We therefore decide to develop a gesture, a hyphen linking the existing road to the castle, a materialization and reinterpretation of the existing access path.
In this way, we revalue the access to the castle, which is affirmed as the purpose of an ascent, languorously told through the contemplation of the place, the staging of the silence of the mountain.We aim to sew history & landscape together.
This approach is motivated by the desire to offer a route seeking to capitalize the identity of the site by engaging in its relationship with the mountains, the ruins, the village, the forest. The castle, the arrival point of the project, culminates on the mountain and serves as a permanent reference point revealing its various facets as the visitor progresses along the route. Our project ultimately seeks to celebrate the site, anchored in the field, as if it had always been there. The morphology of the road, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, shows the landscape and offers a multiplicity of uses enriching the quality of the place.
It integrates the housing, offers tiered areas, allows the insertion of a museum, an open-air theatre, with the context as an unique ornament. The dwellings are integrated into the project in such a way as to merge in a fluid private and public manner, enabling the maintenance of a clear and unitary gesture of establishment, without jeopardizing the privacy of the guests.
The housing typologie aims to integrate the territorial characteristics of the site, namely a path on the height, as well as the simultaneous relation to the ruins and the landscape. Thus, each dwelling develops a split-level course, exploiting the slope situation, with the north a relation to the ruins and the south to an opening on the mountains. These different relations are translated trough space and windows geometry.
The outside entrance area is made through a patio located to the north. It offers a privacy threshold and draws the first sequence of access to housing, the finality of which is embodied by the room.
The combination of wood-concrete material reminds one of medieval ambiences. The accentuation of the horizontal in the mineral treatment echoes the «stratified » expression of the castle.
