COLLE ANTICO
The farmhouse of Colle Antico is located on the hills right outside Caldarola village, in the Marche region, and was built in the early 1900s.
The structure has weathered years of abandon and endured the tremors of several earthquakes, resulting in the gradual deterioration of its skeleton. While a comprehensive reconstruction is mandatory to respond to contemporary safety and legal standards, the project aims to preserve and repurpose a few architectural elements from the original structure such as some selected beams and all the natural stones cladding.
Embedded within the traditional milieu of farmsteads and rural constructs, the Colle Antico project beckons an exploration of regional identity, embracing the normal and the ordinary, as a strategy to deal with the conservationism of the area. The facades are almost banal in their traditionalism, but in the way the openings take little shifts apart from the rational grid lies the narrow span of contradiction that makes you look at it twice.
The scale and rhythm of the windows is also a deliberate choice of framing the landscape, rather than offering the panorama all at once, encouraging a more contemplative engagement with the exterior. In this sense, it’s the position of these frames that determine the interior arrangement of an otherwise neutral and square floorplan.
photos and drawings © MOTOR
Typology: architecture, renovation
2020 - ongoing
Caldarola, Marche (Italy)
220 m2
Collaborators: geom. Alessandro Butinelli, Studio Renzi (structural engineering)