Villa Nesi, Ivrea Turin

Ingenious messiness It is not easy for an architect to think up solutions for a context such as that of Ivrea. In this little museum-city, strongly marked by the presence of Olivetti, the relationship between memory and nostalgia and that between an authoritative past and a rather incoherent presence is still an open issue.

Hence the Archisbang group from Turin, when confronted with the request to widen and restructure an old building in an anonymous and disharmonic outskirt of Ivrea, decided to face up to the challenge by providing an ironic and challenging answer, in opposition with the current conformism of local building approaches.

The building they had to re-design was to host commercial spaces on the ground floor and offices and residences on the upper ones. Archisbang envisaged a path leading to the building, and starting with a bright red walkway that runs amongst the garden’s grass then suddenly acquires thickness and turns into a “chromatic 3D ribbon”: the ribbon basically leads to the stairway and seems to welcome it while at the same time dilating it until it wraps the last floor of the building. A sort of big “eye”, that serves as a belvedere and underlines the contrast between the typically Turin shyness of the existing building and the imaginary language of the new elements, is only apparently invasive: in reality it is carefully controlled in its proportions, as well as in the covering and the ways the openings are cut.

The ventilated high-tech facade in porcelain stoneware SistemA by Marazzi Tecnica, realized with red colored elements in the format 60 x 120 cm distinguishes the design also from a material point of view thanks to the Lux finish that makes the surface particularly bright and attractive.