◄ WORKS / Alpeggio Prato Rotondo
Client: Municipality of Garessio
Location: Garessio, Italy
Type: Mixed-Use Architecture
Commission: Design and Construction Project
Phase: Under Construction
Year: 2020
In collaboration with Arch. Davide Maria Giachino (architecture, planning and works supervisor), Arch. Massimo Allamandola (architecture, project administration and management), Arch. Claudia Zappia (architecture), Engr. Enrico Ravagnan (structures).
Alpeggio is the Italian term used to describe the activities of the alpine pastures during summer season. During this time, shepherd families and their animals live in the mountains at around 1500 meters above the sea level. The pastures are fresh, cool, and well watered at these altitudes, providing great feeding ground for the animals. Throughout history, a lot of shepherd lodges and animal shelters have been erected in Ligurian Alps. Off season, they become a silent part of the territory, almost a geological feature, and certainly a manifestation of a long-standing tradition and culture. In 2020 the Garessio Municipality launched a competition for design and construction of new shepherd lodges to support the development of this tradition. Alpeggio Prato Rotondo was a winning entry.
There is a small stone house already in place at the site of the new building. This house, built in the late 1980s, does not correspond to the current regulations applied to a residence, albeit seasonal. The premise therefore was to demolish it, and substitute with a new structure. The competition, at the same time, asked for a possibility to include a dairy laboratory as part of the lodge, all while working with relatively low budget. The idea, therefore, was to preserve the stone structure and make it part of the lab. Since the spaces needed for the lab were larger than the stone structure, the only new function it could obtain was that of the dairy storage. Thus, it became clear that the project could be a composition of old and new.
Maintaining the necessary distance, a new structure was outlined on the available land, to the east of the stone house, now the dairy storage. Distributional logic suggested placing the lab next to the storage, with the residential part further in sequence. All spaces were distributed along the elevation contours of the terrain. Lodge and lab must be separate spaces according to the hygienic norms. A compact and economical way to do that was to insert a common service block between them. Now it was a question of dimensioning the spaces according to their function, and giving some uniting motif to the whole.
Sometimes it’s a matter of a single gesture to resolve the compositional problem. Having three rectangular spaces placed in line did not create nor participation, neither a common theme. At a certain point, a line was drawn across the rectangle of the new structure in order to turn it towards the old one from the facade, and creating a public multi-purpose space between the two as a result. Suddenly, they were talking to each other across the common square. As an extra value, the shepherds obtained a tranquil space to present their products to the visitors and tourists, passing from the road just several meters down the hill.
When we discussed the project with the shepherd family that was about to use it, the head of the family said: ‘I like that it’s further up the hill. In this way, the car dust risen from the road won’t reach us, protected by the plants on the hill.’ It was an interesting observation. Nobody thought about the dust during the design phase, but the design had an answer of its own.