Bolzano Province Headquarter competition

The site

The object of the competition area is located in the immediate vicinity of the train station and looks back towards the center of the city and opposite to the Alps and the rugged mountains. The volumes required by the notice was not possible to contain the mass of the building within the heights of the neighboring ones and therefore the project was to soar out of the context around .

The concepts of project

From these premises, it was difficult to keep the project on a simple static volume . The proportions were too rigid and the building would be translated into a simple exercise in style on the design of the facades ( more strange, less strange, twisted, curved or otherwise) as is now happening way too inflated in all new buildings. The building would thus become a building too trendy , without concepts , and after a few years would soon become old , with the same effect today give us the facades of buildings 70s or 80s.

For us, Architecture is a language with which the designer says his thoughts and so we wanted to create a project that would tell the following concepts.

Maximum functionality

It may seem like an obvious concept , but now most of the new architectures are not very functional as favoring form over function . We believe that the first building should perform its functions in the best possible way. From this, the project has been developed on a rectangular shape with two emergency staircases at either end , a central corridor and functions to the sides to make the project efficient and well distributed . This allowed us to observe maximum volumes required .

The taper

We then wanted to lighten the planting base of the project through a process of tapering volumes upwards , which start with larger dimensions at street level and gradually decreased in depth in three subsequent steps, going from 14.1 m just 7.5 m at the top. This process lightens the volume and leads to a upward momentum that recalls the one hand, the tension of Gothic cathedrals and, secondly, the shape of the surrounding mountains , which decrease gradually up to the snowy peaks . These solutions are fascinating examples of taper already realized both in American skyscrapers – just think of the famous Chrysler Building in NY- is tapered in the roofs of the historic buildings of Bolzano and the Alps

Metaphor of the mountain

With this solution we also wanted to postpone tapered to the memory of the beautiful mountains of the Alps around . The mountains are in fact born from a larger base from which to dwindle through the woods up to the snow-covered peak .
To this end, we have defined the design and materials of the facade. It is all glass and covered with long vertical louvers very dense ( with step 30cm) to reduce energy consumption and to fit within the parameters of energy saving .
The material of these sunscreens is provided differently in each of the four volumes overlaid with steps to characterize and to give the idea of an overlapping of the layers of the mountain. In the first way to share the slats are made of stone laid , as the rocks of the mountains, in the second of larch wood , as the trees of the mountains, in the third stainless steel to symbolize the cold of the snow, and finally glass to remember ice on top of the mountain .

Dynamic transformation

In addition to the metaphor, the change in the heaviness of the material from the bottom up – from the heaviness of the stone at the base up to the transparency and lightness of glass on top – is designed to physically perceive a gradual lightening of the building, not only in shape of the volumes, but also in their material consistency. This change of materials leads to emphasize the tension building up. Looking at it from the bottom up , the headquarters of the province seem to fade a heavy base to the top of a transparent and immaterial.
This perception physics of materials will give the project a fascinating dynamic material that will make the project unique and fascinating. For this purpose, the functions were distributed following the trend of volumes and materials.