Under the pink roof
The project for the Foro Boario area in Borgo San Lorenzo in the province of Florence is an urban regeneration initiative funded by the PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan) funds, aimed at giving the community a functional, contemporary, and flexible space.
The Foro Boario area owes its name to the fact that since the early 1900s it hosted the annual Agriculture and Livestock Fair, and over the years, it continued to be the reference space for events, local festivals, concerts, and other manifestations, defining the area's exhibition character and its role as a cultural and social hub for the town and the Mugello region.
In 2021, the Municipal Administration initiated a participatory design process involving Agenzia Lama, with the objective of listening to the people who live in that area daily, gathering their suggestions and ideas for new uses and spaces.
The area was in a state of decay and physically fragmented, divided into three altimetric levels: one designated for parking and the other two as gravel squares. It was crossed by Via Caduti di Montelungo, and thus marked by a physical separation that isolated the residential center from the river ecosystem.
The main challenge clearly emerged from the participatory process: to mend the urban fabric with the natural context, free up space for events and manifestations, and rebuild a new, functional pavilion for local festivals and traditional “sagre” (food festivals).
The area's master plan includes an infrastructural reconfiguration that involves moving the route of Via Caduti di Montelungo. By moving the road - and thus cars and traffic - away from the river area and positioning it on the lowest of the three existing terraces, the project achieved two fundamental results: on the one hand, it created a vast, unified, and free area immediately adjacent to the banks and existing pedestrian/cycle paths, opening up new, previously unexpressed usage possibilities; on the other hand, it maximized the sensory distance between the space reclaimed for the park and the road, mitigating noise and traffic and improving the perception of quiet and contact with nature in the Nuovo Foro Boario.
The new urban park is designed on a network of pedestrian and cycle paths that accompany the visitor in a walk of progressive detachment from the town’s anthropized environment toward the natural context of the river.
In the heart of this urban park, equipped with sports, play, and rest areas, stands the Nuovo Padiglione (New Pavilion), conceived as an identity icon of the Foro Boario. The building is composed of two functional volumes: spaces for community-use kitchens on one side, and spaces for a bar managed by local associations and public restrooms on the other. The two blocks are united by a striking element: a majestic, terracotta-colored roof.
The roof, constructed with a load-bearing glulam timber structure, is the conceptual heart of the project. In clear contrast to the formal neutrality of modernism, the architecture chooses to emphasize the roof, elevating it to a vernacular element, understood as a form "capable of dialoguing with the population."
The large roof aims to become a constructed metaphor for aggregation, a large shelter under which citizens find protection and shared identity. The space created beneath it, between the functional volumes, transforms into a grandiose, protected, and welcoming open-air civic hall, intended for meeting and sharing. The pavilion is thus configured as a "bridge" structure with a permeable and open central part, inviting passage and traversal. This element connects the two park areas to the north and south of the pavilion, configuring itself as the project's focal point.
The chromatic and volumetric choice is not random but an explicit declaration that recognizes the popular and festive role of the building, transforming it into a visible and unmistakable landmark. The central idea of the project moves along this dual purpose: on the one hand, to create a covered space for aggregation, and on the other, to elevate the roof to an identifying element. In this way, the visual reference is capable of overcoming intellectual abstraction in favor of a celebration of collective identity, offering people the possibility of recognizing themselves again in the building and its shared meaning, placing the deep relationship between community and architecture at the center of the constructed space.
