Tuttiarchitetti: Casa SG

A wooden “hut” placed on the top of a lava stone-building in Catania, Sicily, rotates on itself onto two big terraces that seem carved in the volume below.

Sicilian-based studio Tuttiarchitetti developed an extension project for a 5 meters wide and 20 long-building in Catania, made of generous walls of lava stone – survived at the massive construction process that took place in the Seventies – with only two diagonal openings, towards North-East facing a public garden, and towards South-West facing the city.

A wooden “hut” is placed on the lava fragment of the house and rotated six degrees, cut on the below volume and carved by two terraces, like a gem set between the rears of tall buildings.

The project consists in the elevation of an early Twenty-century building conceived as a workshop and then adapted as a house. The single-storey volume has been preserved from the intense construction process that invested the outskirts of the city starting form the Seventies.

In this case, the earthworks made to found the high buildings around isolated the lava stone masonry used as the foundation plan of the project.

For the structure of the new building, resting on top of the old one, Tuttiarchitetti chosen wood for its practical advantages in terms of energy saving and resistance to earthquakes, but also to emphasize the nature of the intervention, which wants to restore dignity and value of the “precarious” works.

The insulation and the coating are made with Etna’s chestnut, a material with an ancient tradition in local architecture. The shape of the building is the archetype of the house, with the gable roof; but its familiarity is contradicted by the ridge’s rotation of six degrees.

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