Over the last few decades the hilly landscape of the Marche region has been managed and transformed less sensibly and farsightedly than in Umbria or Tuscany. Nonetheless, similarly to these neighboring areas, one can still admire here the distinctive combination of an intrinsically picturesque, productive agricultural territory, with constructions and urban settlements of great historical value.
The issue of inserting a contemporary architecture within such a delicate context is addressed most of the times through the replication of vernacular volumes and languages, often in the frame of existing buildings’ renovations. An alternative option, muscular and all-in-all outdated, was experimented a few years ago by Archea with the famous Antinory Winery in the Chianti Classico (2012), a land architecture that artificially reshapes the slope where it stands.
For the new Academy of Music in Camerino Alvisi Kirimoto (with Studio Harcome) adopt a third solution. They design an ethereal, rather than mimetic volume, one that during the day blurs not with the land but with the sky, and that glows as a lantern at night. Therefore, the Academy is entirely clad with white sheet metal panels, with perforations of varying size, following a strategy that is conceptually and visually close to LAN Architecture’s EDF Archives in the countryside of Bure, France (2011).
Realized with the support of the Andrea Bocelli Foundation, as part of the reconstruction following the 2016 earthquake, the Academy of Music hosts an office, nine classrooms and an auditorium. Through a full-height glazed wall, the latter overlooks Camerino’s historic center, on the opposite side of a gently sloping valley, thus providing a contemporary reinterpretation of the connection between an extra moenia monument and the fortified town, typical of Italian villages of ancient origins.
- Project:
- Academy of Music
- Location:
- Camerino, Italy
- Architects:
- Alvisi Kirimoto with Harcome
- Project team Alvisi Kirimoto:
- Massimo Alvisi, Junko Kirimoto, Silvia Rinalduzzi
- Project team Harcome:
- Andrea Gianfelici
- Construction management and coordinator:
- Studio Tecnico Ing. Paolo Bianchi
- Client:
- Andrea Bocelli Foundation
- Ground floor area:
- 600 sqm (academy), 4,650 sqm (external areas)
- Completion:
- 2020