Channelbeta - projects - ex cinema Arena Braga

The site forms part of the urban extension of one town pertaining to the diffuse long conurbation of the Adriatic coast. Its setting is behind one of the oldest and most glorious game buildings: the Kursaal.

The building lies upon a rectangular lot along the east-west direction, bordering the sea; the project themes are challenged by the morphology and type of a series of details which seem to be very disadvantageous at first sight:

- the shape, with a very impressive length;

- the use of the ground floor (equipment and services for the cinema), resulting in the need for a completely free connection to the ground;

- the presence of a very high and close building on the southern side.

The project tries to reinterpret all this by the attempt of giving these details architectural significance:

- the vertical distribution was placed in the main façade, so as to have the ground floor be entirely used without interruptions, thus becoming the main front and emphasizing the flow pathlines within the building;

- the introspection topic, as well as light adjustment/capturing influenced by the significant bordering buildings, has become the reason for the glass skin wrapping up the building. This becomes the interface between the inside and the outside, the light adjusting device and the unifying element which changes its form and shape chameleon-like, according to the different actions taking place into the building.

This skin bends and 'flakes'; it is a visual protection screen and a light capturing device at the same time. This is the place of reflections and reverberations; windows disappear whereas flakes define cuts and projections, a surface with a sort of thickness of its own in which jutting openings face onto the sea, like sighting posts.

The building houses holiday flats.

Since the building shape is very long, the idea is to conceive these spaces as boat-like rather than set on firm ground; the access to all flats is provided by a long "bridge" on the last floor, linking to the living areas of the flats. The open space living room-kitchen is connected to the rooms downstairs with stairs in wood and iron (below deck) but one may as well go upstairs on the deck/terrace on the upper floor.

The flat complex "floats" upon a ground floor which is totally empty and dematerialized, connected to earth by means of a long glass wall.

Within an amorphous building context, the comparison is directed toward the 20th-century Kursaal, by continuously opposing materials and shapes which express lightness (glass, metal, laminate) to the Kursaal's plastered wall mass.

The images of the white mosaic blade emerging among the neoclassical buildings in corso Italia in Milan, and of the Astrea co-operative house or the "girasole" in viale Buozzi in Rome come to the author's mind in this instance. Functional issues are but an excuse to measure our skills against the heritage of projects and works that Italian architects of the 50s and 60s gave us.

A period in history which is extremely interesting, since we faced hybridism, multiplicity, uncertainty.

A mixed condition that I believe belongs to our job.

A homage to Luigi Moretti.

Giovanni Vaccarini

Translated by Michela Lucchini