The Luigi Rovati art museum

The underground renovation, redevelopment and expansion project curated by studio di Mario Cucinella has taken care of transforming the building into a modern museum space, one of a kind.

A 3,000 square meter sustainable machine that finds coherent answers in relation to the fundamental themes of urban regeneration (through the meticulous recovery of the building) and attention to the reduction of water and energy consumption (even with a photovoltaic system positioned in the pitched roof on the inside of the building) and the reuse of materials.

The work, in relation to the systems, insulation and environmental comfort (thermal, acoustic and visual) followed the dictates that allowed it to achieve LEED certification.

During the five years of the construction site, the building's reinforced structures were suspended on steel micropiles before excavations began under the existing foundations for the construction of the two underground levels, the second of which is intended for depositing the works and to the plants.

Thus, an excavation of 2,320 cubic meters was carried out with the top-down system, removing 7,000 cubic meters of soil.

“Architects have the privilege of first imagining the space they are going to build. Transforming an immaterial thing into a material one is an extraordinary (and risky) mental exercise that has to do with the paradigm of time. Here it was a bit like looking at the vase and being inside the vase.

I asked myself how to value the historical time, which had left marks and memories in the late nineteenth-century building, and the more contingent one relating to the museum visit.

In a narration that was inspired together by the reading codes of Buckminster Fuller and by the Etruscan necropolis. The Art Museum houses such a powerful collection, even when the Etruscan world enters into dialogue with works closer to us - if we think, for example, of the terracotta vase by Pablo Picasso which evokes the image of the Etruscan banquet - that the it should not dissipate the user's attention.

I tried to express a simultaneity of times in the continuous flow of a spatial itinerary, where the ancient and the contemporary dialogue by opposition or contiguity”, says Mario Cucinella.

In fact, let us not forget, as underlined by the sociologist Mario Abis, that "the museum is a physical and mental space, two values that integrate and amplify in the relationships between container and contents, generating gradients of knowledge, empathy, memories, emotions.

Everything participates in the construction of a personal experience that is care in the time that we are and that we are going through. And if time is a representation of mental spaces, it becomes an allegory of expansion in the underground space".

Thus one could hear the echo of a 'Chamber of the Giants' in the sinuous fluidity of the parametric curved lines that shape the three circular rooms and a large elliptical one, built in excavations with stone ashlar walls designed one to one and assembled with an intervention of the highest artisan and technological expertise.

25,000 ashlars were required, the equivalent of one hundred blocks of Pietra Forte Fiorentina with a sandblasted finish anchored to a steel structure (the backstage is partially visible from the large window crowns the children's room), to make the transition to a more intimate world perceptible, hidden in the shadows and in the rapture of an enveloping mono-material, culminating in domed ceilings of various sizes made of sound-absorbing material in special finishes.

“You can hardly see the detachment with the stone used at the heights of the side walls. But we were thus able to resolve the critical acoustics generated by the conditions of the underground landscape. Numerous experiments and teamwork between different professionals have been significant to achieve this solution.

In particular, the full-scale mock-up of a portion of the dome proved to be fundamental", recalls the architect. The gap between the stone slabs, all arranged horizontally and spaced 5 millimeters apart, 5 centimeters thick and one meter long, was then punctuated by small lights which feed the chiaroscuro effects but also by small holes for an optimal flow of ventilation in the rooms.

The final assembly ensured the hidden installation of the systems and multimedia technology in the ceiling which allows, among other things, effective visual mapping in the reconstruction of urban morphologies and building typologies that virtually connect the city of the living to that of the dead.

Equally challenging was the design of the essential but highly sophisticated glass cases with bronze profiles that integrate mini LED spots guided by a magnet to change the light orientation without opening the exhibitors.

The other spaces of the Art Museum appear very different from level to level.

On the ground ground, the bookshop, ticket office and café-bistro develop on the sides of a majestic entrance hall: the junction square which also constitutes the passage for the back garden, a living room hidden by the perimeter walls that enclose it on three sides and enlivened by the 'telluric' but green expansion of the underlying domes up to the pavilion reserved for temporary exhibitions at the back.

The mezzanine floor has been redesigned for the Foundation's offices, the second intended for temporary events and exhibitions; the last one to the restaurant designed in the interior design by the studio Flaviano Capriotti Architetti (like the bistro on the ground floor) and embellished with a site-specific work by the artist Andrea Sala overlooking the panoramic window.