Carrara Thermal Baths
Architecture idea competition organised by ReThinking
Credits : Benjamin Nicaud & Victor Trosset & Romain Spagnoli
3rd place
The breathtaking landscape of the Carrara marble mines, shaped by the hand of human, has an incredible evocative power. Its still echoes from its industrialized past, where man has dug ceaselessly to extract a noble material, shaping a landscape for eternity, leaving its ineffaceable trace in the territory.
To invent a project with a humble position towards this man shaped land means facing the power of what is already here. But the already here has such a strong power of wonderment, of memory, that no action could be powerful enough to enhance the intrinsic beauty of the site. The incredible landscape cannot be embraced, nor understood, by just standing in one single point, but walking, striding through the site, its marble cathedrals, its natural basins led with runoff water.
This position guides the project to flirt with what makes essence of the site : the material. As a result, the project does not aim to admire the beauty of this landscape, but to immerse the visitor in the core of the material. Being radical : extract ourselves from the landscape to dive in the site, in its very own materiality, and face its monumental power.
