TAVOLA 1

© SUDARCH . Published on October 13, 2011.

Basic knowledge Fez. the Holy City of Morocco, at 350 m ASL, at the bottom of a fertile Valley. For its buildings, Markets and Mosques, the old city is one of the most attractive sites of the whole Islamic world. It is the oldest imperial city and the third largest of Morocco for the population and owes this prestige to its secular political predominance and to the importance of its ancient university on culture and art of the Muslim North Africa. Nowadays the old Medina is one of the world’s largest pedestrian areas, the medieval town is a big labyrinth of narrow streets where no cars. Since then it seems that time has not changed things much, the city lives in the past, almost like an open air museum. For these reasons, Fez el-Bali has been declared as UNESCO World Heritage Site.

TAVOLA 2

© SUDARCH . Published on October 13, 2011.

Endogenous factors, source of inspiration. The leather Tanneries of Fes, the oldest, are famouses in Morocco, and are those that, especially for their stench, seem to suggest almost an athmosphere by Dante’s Inferno. According to tradition, they had been actually built by the town founder. Kasbahs had a military function (housing for the soldiers) then became the official residence and became the symbol of the Dynasty. Similarly, the Ksar Berbers are fortified villages, consisting of a rectangular space surrounded by walls with towers at the corners and a single entrance. Between the wall and the village in general there is a maze of streets, houses, courtyards. They are also sustainable buildings, as those in clay, bringing significant benefits: cool in summer and warm in winter. The interiors, lavish or modest, almost always give off a thrilling spirituality and sensuality. Thanks to the use of a single material, these building become true artistic creations.

TAVOLA 3

© SUDARCH . Published on October 13, 2011.

Architectonic proposal and technical specification. The formal concept is a synthesis of two guiding elements: leather working process (first symbol) and fortified Villages (second symbol). A fortress-building, but penetrable, which rises from a vacuum, a sort of urban carpet designed by parallel stripes evoking the strips of leather, that rises to jump over the river, becoming a container of functions. As an unusual metamorphosis in shape and space, the complex is based on linear overlap of vertical rectangulars, differents each other for heights and sizes, placed out of symmetry with respect each other, covered with a skin of lightweigh concrete with rubble stone, of white color, which reconstructs in facade the urban pattern. The supporting structure is like a single monolith carved, an alveolar box. The organization of the interior spaces is rather flexible in order to change areas and routes and to create several atmospheres according to the project functions and types of use. The architectural concept is to point on the exaltation of the intervention as a public place, a crossroads of cultures and places and businesses. The permeability of the building (outside / inside / outside), the choice of a single material for the intervention (square / facade / interior), wants to characterize and sublimate the site, that is directly presented both as a symbol of intervention both as a symbolic intervention.

IL CONTESTO

© SUDARCH . Published on October 14, 2011.

Sustainibility. Biological, ecological, social, economic. The area of the decisions influencing on costs of sustainibility has been valued considering the longlife of the building in the time (from its built to its management). The strict design approach has measured already the costs of sustainibility in the participation phase to the competition (for example, this project has been printed on ecological paper)

LA PIAZZA

© SUDARCH . Published on October 14, 2011.

Functionality. Urban, architectonic, performating: the area of the decisions has undertaken to translate the objectives of competition in language, expression of the contemporaneity, of a cultural state, answering to required functions, according to with current needs of energy saving and environmental protection.