WINNER T YOUNG CLAUDIO DE ALBERTIS AWARD
Simone Gobbo
Bivacco F.lli Fanton
MARMAROLE, BELLUNO, ITALY
2015 – UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Credits: Simone Gobbo, Alberto Mottola, Davide De Marchi
Architectural firm: DEMOGO
Rendering: SFSight Visual
Photographs: Pietro Savorelli
The Marmarole is a wild and impassable mountain range. The saddle where the work is placed is a vast, boundless area at an altitude of 2,670 metres; a context made of rock, light, wind, snow and distance. High– altitude architecture takes on an extreme meaning: everything seems to expand when perceiving a vast open space. From an emotional standpoint, opposite feelings emerge, such as the desire to explore and move about in this dilated space, and the need to protect oneself and to seek refuge, going back to a human dimension.
Bivacco Fanton is a project whose proportions lie between the absolute and moderation, a minute work that finds its dimension in the possibility of perceptive amplification. Inhabiting the bivouac alpine shelter means standing between the lens of a spyglass. It’s an attempt to frame space, to delineate it, to make it the link between man and environment, to define a pause capable of finding a temporary limit to the landscape, a form of progressive compression of rocks, light, wind and snow. It’s a shaky balance, which takes shape inside the shelter: a wooden belly that dampens the impact of wild nature, the glass fibre growing thicker as each new layer is added, gradually becoming a second skin and then shell and structure alike.
Externally, its formal aspect is that of a sketched–out volume, suspended on a bristly ridge, a waiting body, stretching out into the void, trying to open a spatial dimension on the other side of its internal geometry.
Measuring yourself, measuring space, getting lost, losing the spatial dimension, finding your own habitat, resisting, flexing yourself, anchoring yourself, changing perception, reaching out, bending, reacting, accumulating expansions and contractions, taking a helicopter, disappearing in the snow, being swept by the wind, adapting yourself like a body at high altitude must, becoming architecture and ceasing to be it, crushed by the vastness of an absolute landscape.