Enclosed Echoes

Contest partecipation:

Reuse Italy - Reuse the Tower

2023

Torre Rinalda, Lecce

TEAM:

Diego Armando Badillo Andrade

Riccardo Giuseppe Meneghello

"Paradise etymologically suggests an enclosure, a place to preserve the things of man, the intimate infinity. Thus, recalling the lithographic imaginary of Atanusius Kircher “topographia paradisi terrestris”, our proposal arises through the decisive insertion of an enclosure that protects the tower from the merciless sea. That restrains the wrath of Poseidon, who tries to destroy the work of mortals.

The walls are bare, manifesting the inherent condition of the material that intends to reach that spiritual quality of the structure capable of transmitting the sensation of eternity through its deterioration and the passage of time. Therefore, the proposed elements are not defined as pristine, but as narrators of worn-out pasts. They are nothing but a collection of aggregates obtained from the soils where the other towers stand, then , paraphrasing Borges, the tower is all the towers and none at the same time, a palimpsest of strata, an artifice of situations, architecture after all.

Simultaneously, certain operations are proposed in the enclosure plans. First, a set of precise incisions that separate and announce slight changes of level, but also frame the tower. The two flared openings on the east and west axes, which are symbolically directed towards the nearest towers, narrate a metaphor of continuity with history, announce the “memini & moneo”: to remember, to preserve, to honor, to warn."

from the project report

Nevertheless, the intervention is minimal and refine; a staircase that allows access to the highest level and two planes on the east and south elevations, which in a kind of formal benevolence, give it a slight fact of completeness through the fragment, attempting “...to preserve the expressive value of the ruin to achieve the liberation of its true form”. A form that has already served and perhaps even been surpassed, but prevails as a physical fact that having lost the superfluous have become universal and therefore, does not admit the excessive, the ornamental, the unnecessary.

Thus, the function does not have to be precise in the strict sense, but emerges as a container of possible events, a scenario for the unpredictability of life - nothing will happen here; rather, so many things will happen at the same time that it is better to say that nothing happens. The ancient, confronted with new conditions, finds its “raison d’être” as architecture, a melancholic eternity of possible worlds.

Knowing that destiny likes repetitions, variations and slight anachronisms, this proposal can be replicated as many times as possible; the enclosure corresponds to the world of archetypes and can shelter other towers from other lands. The combinations are endless, but the future will find their similarities. Final notes on the design. The design of the plan keeps a strict relationship of proportions. Based on mathematics and the fixed rules of geometry, arbitrariness has been avoided in order to find the beauty hidden in the sacred order of numbers.

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