THEATRE RENOVATION
The theatre renovation is a spontaneous project, born as an effective answer to the collective interest of the local community of the tiny village of Bione. The common ground is the reactivation and enhancement of the whole built heritage together with all those elements characterizing the cultural identity of the specific place. Among those it pops out the old local theater dating back to the first half of the XXth century which has been going through a rather long history of usage, mutations and abandonment. The place is well known by the community as a key reference for the sense of belonging, such major factor assigns a strong value to the place both from a cultural and physical point of view; basing therefore a legitimacy to all the thinking and doing standing behind such active intervention and pointing it out as a recovery of the memory.
Bione is a small village located in Brescia province, north of Italy. 1369 inhabitants installed on a mountainous territory for an extension of 17 Km2 and 600m altitude.
Therefore, the tight net of elements on the background, together with the network of individual actors taking part in, builds up the foundation of the whole path taken by the design and strategy process as a reaction to the increasing trend of traditional culture abandonment.
Such spreading feeling of desertation taking place if the ancient or rather remote historical settlements is teaming up with a diffuse loss of accuracy in future planning strategies about the past. It happens way too often unfortunately that the spontaneous sense of belonging to a specific cultural milieu could be altered by misleading opportunities.
My priority, in such situation, is instead to re-establish and express a cultural awareness by means of an active container: the new theater. Thus, the designed space aims at embracing, beyond the mere function, the local culture in its whole range of aspects and expressions involving, starting from the very beginning, the totality of elements, people, associations and institutions revolving around cultural heritage and identity preservation.
Moreover, the architectonic object of the theater itself offers multiple potential displays which could easily cooperate with the actualizing of intentions.
As for a more physical point of view, the morphological role of the artifact within the surrounding settlement turns out to be the basic strategy applied where the revitalized space is introduced to the village as a container of cultural debate and meeting.
Concretely speaking the building is set in the very heart of the built fabric and it interacts with the surrounding with a coherent language based on a physical conversation of materiality and geometry allowing and safeguarding a deep bonding with the local territory.
As such the design process aims at enhancing the central value of the ground as the most democratic surface/stage of primordial and thus traditional meeting, relation, cohesion and sharing.
