The President of the Milan Triennale Claudio De Albertis has announced the winner of the Medaglia d’Oro all’Architettura 2015, Massimo Carmassi with ISP and IUAV Studi e Progetti, for the restoration of the bakery of the Caserma Santa Marta at the university, in Verona, Italy, 2014.
The jury decided to assign the most important prize to the renovation of the western silo and the bakery of the Caserma Santa Marta of Verona. The project commissioned by the University of Verona and designed by Massimo Carmassi with Gabriella Ioli Carmassi, ISP and IUAV Studi e Progetti adapts this extraordinary complex to the needs of a modern facility for higher education.
The intervention supervised by Carmassi cannot be defined simply as a work of restoration, though careful operations of restoration were part of the job. Neither is this a pure work of functional conversion, although the parts completed to date do a good job of housing new classrooms and new services. Considering the project as a whole, it is more like a true work of contemporary architecture built in close relation to the existing context.
In this case the project, in addition to materially salvaging historic stone structures, sets itself the task of clarifying the original spaces, through interventions that bring out their nature, developing them in a convincing way by implementing the only true form of protection of a structure from the past, that of avoiding a conservative, museum-like approach and also avoiding decay, permitting a continuity of life in harmony with the nature of the place, while adapting it for new uses.
Medaglia d’Oro prizes for the career were assigned to Mario Bellini, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Franco Purini and Francesco Venezia.
