Hut
Topology
The small building sits on a long, narrow lot in Rossano Veneto. This lot had been lawned for decades, used as the garden of the nearby family home. The home of the owners is too close to the road and constrained by other buildings to have a real outdoor space of relevance. The lot, therefore, remained among the few free ones in the curtains of buildings that face the north and south sides of the street. The urban planning, seeing it 'empty' had therefore placed a visual constraint on the property by virtue of a hypothetical penetration of the view from the road (narrow and busy with heavy vehicles) towards the open countryside to the south. A fleeting glance at 60km/h, perpendicular to the direction of travel, for a stretch of about 15 free meters. A fraction of a second visible only from the cockpit of a tractor. In fact, the hedges and trees on the ground prevented both motorists and pedestrians (who were absent due to the nature of the road) from taking a bucolic look to the south. The project area is surrounded by a varied assortment of contemporary Venetian buildings. Buildings and signs of the Venetian man sprung up in the course of several decades, from the early twentieth century to the present day. The lot itself is a condensation of contemporary Veneto. It faces an arterial road that was once used by a few vehicles for local traffic, but is now busy with heavy vehicles and unsafe for pedestrians. It is squeezed between perfect examples of "geometric" houses (Celati) and it leans southward promising a remnant of rurality, more and more tangible the more you go into the grass.
Typology
Years ago the client had asked the administration to build a house for a son in this place. The building was then made possible by a public-private agreement with which the municipality provided a small residential volume on the site. Meanwhile, needs have changed over the years. It's life. The clients have remained to occupy, modernizing them, the spaces of the existing house. Now, even though they could not develop their current home for contingency and structural reasons, the clients did not rush into the construction of a new house but instead expressed the desire to build a small building to serve the current home, adjacent to the project site. Almost as if it were an upgraded garden shed, or a tamed rural/hunting cabin. The accessory has no services or amenities other than to provide space for hobbies, shelter for household and garden tools. The construction is informed of extreme simplicity, with a gabled form. On the ground floor there is a cellar/garage of about 40sqm and a hallway; on the first floor, reached by a wooden staircase, there is an attic in one space. This room is the protagonist of the building. The stereotypical shape of the shed declares its alterity from the neighboring houses. Its scale, however, recontextualizes it within the built urban context; it is smaller than a house, larger than a tool shed. The impost of the eave line is barely visible above the hedges. The gable is subtly visible from the street, making it tick discreetly and enigmatically. The building is at the head of the perspective flight created, starting from the street looking south, by the lot and the hedges that constrain it at the edges. The buildings facing east and west further constrain the view by directing the gaze towards the focal point on the horizon. This sensation is felt both from the garden around the building and on the 'back' to the south, and from the attic looking through the large glass window. The elevated point of view is privileged, the spatial recollection of the hut and the possibility to look far away accentuate the micro-domestic and intimate dimension to which the building is also devoted. The fronts denote the relationship with the portion of context/scenography towards which they face. To the north, the hut relates to the road; the large door is protected by a canopy, the only element protruding from the outline of the hut. Above this, an off-center window on the front alludes to the other attitudes of the building, both the belly of the hut and the perspective of the fields to the south. To the south, on the other hand, it opens decisively towards the cultivated fields, the sun, the life in the garden, the relationship between those who are intent on outdoor hobbies and those who dedicate themselves to some work in the hut. The east and west fronts, perfectly symmetrical, have almost no openings except for two windows useful for internal ventilation. The wall in these narrow areas by the boundaries is a single story, measured to not perceptively crush those who pass by. The strong slope of the roof and the walkway in stones also declare (as open brackets on the wall) the path of water from top to bottom for only fall. The roof of the building is conceived in relation to the light both towards the sky and inside the shed. The micro corrugated galvanized sheet metal of the external layers changes its color with the weather, chameleonically merging with it. The natural light that permeates the first floor is 'collected' by the chiaroscuro alternation of the wooden roof. This also allows to have two different and amalgamated color temperatures inside the attic.
Tectonics
The perimeter walls are made of reinforced concrete with a thickness of about 30cm. The central plug wall is also designed in concrete. Externally they are plastered in light color. The strongly inclined roofing slab and the intermediate one are in wood built dry and exposed. From the point of view of the structural figure, the roof is resolved as a large truss whose chain is the floor itself. The structural figure corresponds to the spatial figure. The wooden part then works closing the circle of forces weighing on the walls without horizontal thrusts. Each material is used to work at its best, the concrete for mass, the wood for reticular rods, the galvanized sheet metal cover as a protective film. The slab foundation is warm, insulated between the casting and the crawl space. The rainwater runoff system is managed by fall only, without gutters at the base of the stratum. Water is collected on the ground by permeating through a layer of gravel within PEAD pipes. These pipes convey the rainwater (with a flow rate corresponding to two downpipes with a diameter of 100mm, for about 95sqm of development of the aquifer) and dispose of it on site by dispersion on the ground in the southern portion of the lot.
