Riqualificazione urbana a Sora, Frosinone Urban renewal, Sora, Frosinone

This project is the result of a programme for the requalification of the area at the feet of the San Casto and Cassio hills, which dominate the historical centre of the town of Sora, altered during the 1970s by the realisation of a modest building used as a cinema-theatre. The theme of the project develops around this contextual condition, intent on redesigning a currently marginal area as an integrated system of building-wall-path. The elevation facing the open space is dominated by the image of a large element, with a hierarchical succession of walls clad in local stone, which bend to contain the system of paths climbing up the hill and conceal the space occupied by the multipurpose hall. The minimalism of the architectural design exalts the tectonic qualities of the work, devoid of any decoration and denoted by the discrete use of local materials: stone and corten steel. The game instituted by the combined use of these materials gives form to the compositional pattern of the entire project: the geometric continuity of the wall that defines the perimeter of the multipurpose hall towards the plaza, is “shattered” by the insertion of full height cuts used to concentrate the openings and by the volume “set into” it, clad in corten steel, and contain service spaces. The contrast of materials and colours contributes to exalting differences, along the entire length of the wall, in the negative spaces or the leftover elements of the protruding volumes. Everything appears to correspond more with a negation, in the sense of a desire to avoid ostentation, than with a declaration of intents; concealed from view, behind the stone screen, the space of the new building opens up. The multipurpose hall, confined towards the hill by a full height glass wall. The effect generated for visitors is one of both curiosity and surprise: the light reflected off the natural wall – in stone – floods the hall and contributes to the dematerialisation of the artificial wall – in glass – carving out, by contrast, the geometric profile of the structural grid of the steel supports with their trestle-like form. Artifice and nature are once again employed to measure the figurative outcomes of the architectural solution, assigning the first with the clarity of the structure and the second with the aesthetic perception of what surrounds it. Formal suggestion is correlated with variations to the conformation of interior space, which follows the irregular geometry of the roof; in proximity to the entry foyer the space is vertically dilated to welcome a mezzanine that terminates the view opening onto the stair, a sculptural element in corten steel, cantilevered and suspended from the ceiling by steel rods.