Wēijī – When Wounds Become Opportunities
Every city has its own life not always evolving in a linear way.
Amatrice disappeared in a dreadful earthquake the 24th August 2016.
Wēijī – When Wounds Become Opportunities is a thesis project conducted at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm about this town and its future. The project does not seek answers for the immediate, but for the long term, a search for something that remains. The solutions suggested range from the urban scale to the building scale and take into account the delicate context of the village, with its intricate cultural and historical background.
Amatrice is a small village in central Italy, 150 km north of Rome. The 24th August 2016 an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 destroyed the entire historical centre and killed 300 people among a population of 2600 inhabitants. Together with the town a piece of Italy disappeared, a country whose history and culture is still strictly connected to all these little episodes that are testimonies of a glorious past.
How does architecture reconstruct a city that has been brutally wiped out by a catastrophe?
What to keep?
What to give back?
What to add?
What to erase?
These the questions at the foundation of the thesis.
Rebuilding Amatrice means not only rebuilding a town, it means rebuilding an entire community. This can be done only by understanding the true identity of the place and finding a way preserve it.
Wēijī – When Wounds Become Opportunities draws a future for Amatrice that does not forget its past.
Through its four different scales, the project aims on one hand to preserve the identity of the town, the spirit of an Italian village, its rich history, its atmosphere, its connection with the landscape and the community, and on the other hand to suggest a different structure, that can resist years, the force of nature and the changes in the social structure and the living needs.
The proposed urban plan has been guided by an increased ratio between voids and solids, due to the danger represented by the building stock in a seismic event in comparison with the open spaces, streets and squares, that become gathering points and potential safe places where people feel secure waiting for the seismic activity to stop. In fact, Amatrice’s dense urban structure contributed to its destruction and to many deaths when buildings collapsed against each other.
However, in this process was highly important not to compromise the dimensions and proportions of the spaces of the old town. A dramatic change in the urban spaces would produce dissent between the citizens and consequent rejection. The norms for new constructions in seismic areas, if followed, would completely overturn the image of the town, creating big avenues surrounded by short buildings. Fundamental is to preserve the narrow streets which together with the open spaces creates that dynamism, atmosphere and identity of those picturesque Italian villages.
The layout of the new town starts from the already well defined urban structure made of Cardus Maximus (Corso Umberto I) and Decumanus Maximus (Via Roma) and the central core of the main square. The idea is to provide a main piazza for each of the four sectors in which the town has been so divided. The preservation of the street grid and the blocks will maintain intact the street section.
Inside the new town plan great importance is given to open spaces and public life. It is in the piazza that the city as urban and social entity shows itself. Meetings, events, interaction, interchange and a community that becomes tighter and connects itself to a specific place.
In the proposal the piazzas not only assume a social function, but also a practical one: they become the meeting points and safe places where people reunite and face the emergency together. In the case of and emergency it is, in fact, fundamental that the individual can count on the help of the others.
From here the decision to locate the new public buildings around the piazzas, so they can provide a common place to stay and the first aid to population: accommodation, water and food supply, hygiene facilities, medical assistance. These will also become the main centralities for the urban redevelopment that aspires to make Amatrice an active town, avoiding its transformation in a mere touristic attraction, as it is happening in many Italian historical cities. The town hall, the church, the school, the theatre, the museum and the library, the market, will contribute to re-establish the activities that took place before.
In contrast with the increase of public spaces there is a clear definition of private property. The perimeter of the block marks the passage between the public and the private sphere: outside the communal life takes over, inside it leaves the space for the domestic dimension.
The perimeter of the old blocks is preserved and emphasized by the position of a continuous wall, structurally very strong, that prevents the buildings from collapsing into the street. Its design looked back at the old town, where the average height of the building was 10m and many houses were modular of 4m. The main structure of the wall is to considered like a skeleton to which all the housing units are attached.
Modularity, symmetry, alignments are precious elements in seismic resistant design and they have been applied without compromising the diversity of the buildings’ facades that is a peculiar characteristic of the historical centres.
Within the block the design was guided by the respect of the previous building typology: 2-3 storeys-high town houses. The division of the plots tries to produce the same number of properties as before, but this time with an urban tissue not as dense. Every house in the proposal has, in fact, a private backyard with a direct access to the street in the case people need to run out. The old pitched roof became a shed roof that contributes to stabilize the main structure by anchoring the street wall to its foundations.
Units can be arranged and attached together in order to increase their seismic resistance. The building taken in exam is composed by two units and is the result of three modules of 4m combined together.
The design opted for a square layout, ideal for stability due to its perfect symmetry.
The street wall and the entire building is detached from the ground and is floating over a series of pillars mounting base-isolation units. However, this technical solution does not compromise the starting point of the design: the street, preserved intact and still able to accommodate the flourishing city life.
