ArchShowcase Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. Domino in Turin, Italy by MARCApril 11th, 2012 by Sumit Singhal
Article source: MARC A big web-marketing agency moves into a conventional four-story building out of the city center. It promotes a contest among design offices, asking an architecture able to represent and strengthen the identity of its immaterial work, without relying on predictable cyberpunk or – worse – high-tech languages. MARC wins of the contest with this answer: the needed architecture is… restoration. The necessary immateriality is achieved literally, subtracting material from all the thick layers that had hidden what gradually reveals to be a decent building from the beginning of the 20th century.
So not only the brick walls of the original structure are unveiled, but also unsuspected concrete beams, niches, ceilings. The restoration is a radical one: subtractions go as far as demolishing the whole ground floor slab, which is replaced with an almost immaterial (it’s only 5 mm thick) perforated metal sheet. In this way any separation is eliminated between the entrance level and the underground floor, which becomes a spacious and luminous cafeteria. In the rest of the building interventions are minimum, aimed to rationalize circulation and fluxes, and to provide the necessary flexibility for future expansions. Contact MARC
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