Nursery School, Veneto : Architecture Information

The nursery school in Covolo di Pederobba, Treviso, nr Venice, Italy 2006 C+S ASSOCIATI WALLS AND EMPTINESS Prizes: Winner of the Section Education in the Medaglia d'Oro dell'Architettura Italiana 2006 Honourable Mention in the Premio Oderzo 2006 Immersed amongst the vineyards and wheat fields, their rows tracing the memories of ancient crops, where space is marked rhythmically by the stakes supporting vine shoots and loses its colourful third dimension at the moment of ploughing time, is the small plot that hosts the nursery school in Covolo. It appears to be the missing piece necessary to complete the small urban centre, whose stable landmarks include the 16th-century church and bell tower, and the Dominican complex of Villa Bellati. A collection of modest structures is linked by a continuous series of stone walls, held intact by a thin layer of rough plaster. These walls, which accompany us for much of the way into the centre of Pederobba defining the boundaries between the network of roads and cultivated fields throughout the region of the Pedemontana, run adjacent to a meandering mass of vegetation which fills the wide gravely bed of the Piave River. The new project required an approach that consisted in re-writing the same however-fragile plots that have continued to preserve the memory of the place, in anticipation of completing new portions of landscape while simultaneously forming mental landscapes in the minds of the children who live there. Walls and empty spaces. The new building forms an enclosure facing south-east, looking over wheat fields and vineyards, embracing and allowing itself to be defined by the features of the landscape. A rough concrete wall is coloured to match the surrounding landscape, treated with split aggregate to reflect light in a variable manner depending on its orientation. The building is its structure: a wall. A wall which opens to the south like the great arches of the barchesse, the huge porticoed barns typical of the region, revealing, at that point, the massive quality of the structure. A wall that retracts and doubles, colouring itself ta emphasize its passages, its thresholds. A wall that forms itself in response to the tensions of that which it encloses. A wall that travels through the complex, smoothing out while continuing ta guide the unfolding of the spaces. The overhang, the stabilized Sarone gravel paving and the lighting all expand the moment of the threshold, amplifying the classrooms spaces towards the exterior, or bringing the garden, with its sounds and scents, into the school. This operation of extension of the 'door', this transformation of the threshold into an actual space become the imagination of a possible world, different and strange, suspended between inside and out. It represents hesitation, desire, potential, wonder. The Wave Venice images / information from C+S Associati 070409