“L’ULIVO”

TYPE: SWIMMING POOL

LOCATION: PIAN DI SPILLE (VT), ITALY
DESIGN: 2015
COMPLETED: 2016
CLIENT: PRIVATE
DESIGNER: MATTEO BIANCHI

PHOTO CREDITS: COPYRIGHT © LAD

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This job regarded the design of the garden, pool and a canopee of an existing villa.
The site’s peculiarity was the presence of olive trees, while the architecture of the villa, in its simplicity, had an indentation on the façade, placed at the exit to the garden: these two elements were used as starting points in the design. Two ideals axes devide the site: the first hits the olive and is parallel to the villa, the second is placed at the center of the indentation and is transverse to the building. A wooden squared platform is placed at the intersection of these axes. In reaching the platform along the transverse axis, one realizes that the pool system is a longitudinal concrete slab with geometrical holes in order to guest the other elements that compose it: the pool itself and the flowerbed containing the olive tree. These two holes are filled with two different fluids: water and bark.
The pool’s north closing is a further wooden platform that is interrupted and rises upwards becoming a wall containing the showers. This element is the counterpart of the olive tree and marks as a visual boundery, a limit of space before the edge of the lot.
According to Christian Norberg-Schulz, Architecture’s existential purpose is to convert a site into a place, which is to discover the meanings potentially present in the given environment: the ambition of this work is to rationalize the space revealing an order, which was just hidden but yet present in the place.