Visionary is a journal of ideal, ambitious, and challanging projects, where the designers’ choices foster critical thinking about architecture, landscape and cities, by using the practice of composition as a means to encourage formal and geometrical research.
UNA GALLERY VOORLINDEN – Landing art warehouse museum
MASTER’S DEGREE DISSERTATION – ARCHITECTURE
A\Y 2017/2018
Graduand: Michele Razzi
Supervisor : Paolo Di Nardo , Andrea Milani
“The yield or yield point of a ductile material is the stress value that determines the beginning of its plastic deformation. Consequently, the material’s behaviour changes from reversibly elastic to plastic behaviour, and develops irreversible deformations that do not disappear, even when ceasing the stressing force. “
The definition of yield is crucial, in order to explain how we designed the expansion project of a contemporary art museum.
Restored from a historic ninteenth-century country house, and embraced by deeply natural surroundings, Voorlinden Museum, a large, linear, and above-ground building of contemporary architecture, is located in a complex of valuable buildings.
The project embodies the core idea of preserving both functional needs and the environment, by aiming to an expansion of the museum that maintains similar formal characteristics. The new unit is embedded with the ground, as if it were strongly pressed down, resulting in surface movements and textures that turn into footprints, vehicle accessible areas and several green spaces.
The key output of such a process is the skylight, which allows daylight to illuminate the interiors, while turning the building – at night, into a bright bubble in the heart of the park, in an impressive scenery.
By pressing and removing volumes even in the interiors of the whole complex, all the areas are rich in walkways and large loft halls.
The distribution of each area inside the building is determined by its shape, which recalls a long telescope, and leads the path of the visitors through a network of escalators, ramps and layers of long exhibitions areas with contemporary arts examples.
Art is the protagonist. In the first stages of the project, a collection of reference paintings and pictures of such artists as Domenico Gnoli, Mario Giacomelli, and Rodney Smith summarised the main idea of combining compression, yield, and contemporary arts, to express surreal and dynamic environments, where every movement is naturally interpreted by the viewer.
