Mississippi
A venue on stilts rising out of the sea in front of the beach in Gabicce, where Marche borders Romagna's Cattolica; the Mississippi was a Restaurant, Bar Night Club, Dancing, which had its heyday in the 1960s, when on the narrow pier connecting it to the beach paraded the Miss Mississippi, and at the mock sea boat docked speedboats from which the VIPs of those days disembarked.
According to the designer who conceived it in the late 1950s, it was meant to look like a typical riverboat, complete with a huge paddle wheel drawn on the sides.
It was 1959 when the boat Mississippi finally moored in Gabicce, first in a reduced size and in '63 enlarged in the sea part.
The abandonment of the activity of the local restaurant and dancing, the lack of maintenance works over the years and the very vulnerability of the structure attacked by the weather and climatic conditions of the place have over time led to the progressive state of deterioration and precarious preservation of the Mississippi, precluding any possible use of it.
The structure now abandoned for several decades already consists of a platform of about 900 square meters, made of reinforced concrete resting on 48 concrete piles driven directly into the seabed. A building of about 400 square meters with a flat roof for terrace use rests on the platform. Access to the platform and the building is provided by a pier - footbridge connecting with the tourist promenade.
The purpose of the project was to recover the structure, creating a new public container of use and functions, able to meet the needs of the community in general, citizens and users of the Gabicce beach, through a representative space, attractor and catalyst of cultural and tourist initiatives with the function of
promotion, enhancement and dissemination of historical and scientific aspects of the sea, the Adriatic coast and the overlooking promontory of the Natural Park of Mont e San Bartolo.
The design path starts from the complete demolition of the existing reinforced concrete structure, consequently freeing the base platform built on stilts and equalizing the unevenness of the plate determined by the different jumps in elevation that mark the various phases of the building's construction and seaward expansion that took place until the 1990s.
Steel portals, anchored to the head of the existing piles, mark the pitch of the new building structure, leading to a lightening o f the permanent loads on the pile dwelling and defining the new volume and the open spaces of the two heads and the upper panoramic terrace, real plates and squares open to the sea.
The vertical continuation of the outer edge of the façade forms the parapet of the above flat roof slab for terrace use, which is accessed by two metal stairs, open and transparent where the bar serving the structure takes place.
The platform is protected laterally by a stainless steel and mesh parapet, uniform in design along the entire perimeter, transparent to the external view, in order to avoid any possible form of refraction and mirroring determined by the external light impact.
The final image of the facades is determined by the sinuous lines that characterize the large curvilinear glass surfaces, and the outer skin of cladding, reminiscent of the forms of natural and marine organisms, with the application of ceramic tiles, of variable thickness true architectural scales, which break the compactness of the facades of the monoblock, through the material dialogue with the light and reflections of the water that surrounds them.
The interior, represented by a central body at the entrance as a multipurpose service space and two lateral bodies for use as storage rooms and toilets is defined by the multipurpose and functional hall for the various needs of public use, facing the prow of the platform, northward to the open sea.
