A-Way

Cittadella is one of Veneto’s loveliest walled cities and just a few kilometres from major artistic centres such as Padua, Vicenza and Treviso. It is where, from 31 May to 22 June 2014, A-WAY sought “a way” to try out new processes “away” from the familiar and standard approach to infra spaces.

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Architettando cultural association invited three internationally renowned firms to reflect and concretely intervene on a number of spaces that lacked a clear coding: an ideal focus for renewal and locations offering unprecedented opportunities to architects and potential users, as well as the chance to forge new links and relations by reversing or redefining hierarchies and meanings by becoming players in an in vitro workshop and toying with hypothetically repeatable or scalable solutions. All this was done via the language of play and, indeed, the success of the temporary installations was judged by their playfulness.

Architettando invited BAM! Bottega di Architettura Metropolitana in Turin, the Associazione Campomarzio in Trento and Superuse Studios in Rotterdam to also propose solutions that would return currently marginal spaces to collective use. In the same order, they created as many designs for four areas: beside the city walls in the Campo della Marta; the Porta Vicenza underbridge; the Villa Rina pedestrian route; and the Riva IV Novembre park.

Allowed a challengingly low budget, the chosen collectives – representatives of that nomadic, enthusiastic, enterprising and multidisciplinary leaning that lies hidden in every contemporary design office – conceived and, aided by the local population, built four transient pieces of architecture that highlight the potential of four places abandoned because seemingly devoid of manifest values.
The installations were inaugurated by a Bernardo Secchi and Paola Viganò masterclass and subsequently hosted various events, including itinerant lectures and theatrical performances, demonstrating their ability to reactivate residual spaces on a scale of 1:1.

As already mentioned, the language jokingly imposed by the event’s organisers was that of play and how this primordial activity that has accompanied mankind since the very beginning of its existence can (and sometimes must) assume a crucial role in the creative process, repositioning the figure of the architect and leaving him/her free to experiment with new languages, new logics and even new rules.
The play concept was also a common denominator in the series of talks held during the three weeks of A-Way.

Nonetheless, the temporary installations remained the real fulcrum of the initiative, providing an excuse to test the concepts and arguments expressed during the talks.
Architettando concentrated its design action on the roof of an underground car park, within the city walls in Campo di Santa Marta, transforming a portion of the green expanse into a decontextualised beach by revisiting the concepts of the jetty and sun-lounger, introducing sand where it has never been. This allowed people to breach the forced boundary of the pavement around the project zone without feeling guilty.

BAM! Bottega di Architettura Metropolitana literally reconnected the sides of the canal near Porta Vicenza, turning the hypothetical knots of its “sewing” into a number of atypical seats commanding new views of the surrounding landscape and installing a swing in the underbridge, to show how easy it is to create new usage scenarios in a monumental space.

Superuse Studios in Rotterdam employed local waste materials to create a temporary solution for personal and collective reflection in the area around Riva IV Novembre. They assembled 24 windows with timber frames to construct a small pavilion, a simple shelter for a maximum of four people, offering a chance to meet up and imagine the future of that small patch of green space directly overlooking the 1220 walls.

Finally, the Associazione Campomarzio of Trento, radically overturned one of the peculiarities of the contemporary city i.e. the desire to unite different realities into one. They did so by carving out an important new space near Villa Rina via the creation of a wall that separates it from the surrounding environment, achieved by installing a number of timber and fabric partitions. This space serves the library, just a few metres away, and is a hortus conclusus in which to take refuge, host intimate readings or meet acquaintances or strangers. Lighting was also used to turn it into a platform for concerts and talks.

All four installations were produced by play but had to “be of use to someone”. All four constructions were designed and then built with the aid of the local population (plus sponsors and technical partners). All four demonstrated that infra spaces can provide the city with experimentation zones in which to try building new languages of interaction, sharing and integration.

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