Villa on the water
The context is highly anthropized, characterized by the presence of large residential volumes.
The house replaces a small existing building, built in the years in which, to the west, the adjacent complex of Marina di Capo Nero and Capo Pino was built by the architect Daneri.
The construction of a tennis court was planned to serve the adjacent multi-storey building, therefore, the land was characterized by the presence of a high retaining wall in exposed reinforced concrete placed on three of the four border sides. It looked like a large "hole", a missing piece where, over the years, a disused "quarry" effect had been created.
In such an altered context, we took the opportunity to seek a bit of balance between the evident visual arrogance of the neighboring buildings to the west and the elegance of the maritime pines of the garden with swimming pool, designed in 1951 by Porcinai, located next door to the adjacent villa designed by Giò Ponti, to the east. This circumstance suggested us to work on tiptoe, designing a garden first and then a house. The primary intent was to make eloquent the belonging of the new house to the typological models of ephemeral garden architecture and to give the perception, in the view from the sea, of having created a small pavilion serving the garden of the villa next door. Porcinai maintained that "designing and building a garden was making architecture" and that the elements that compose it, in addition to plants, are greenhouses, swimming pools, vases and railings. He defined them as “artificial elements” and described them thus in an issue of Domus in January 1940: “Walls, stones, vases etc. they are not the most important; in no garden should they be. Which doesn't mean forgetting them, because instead we need to pay a lot of attention to them to match them with the surrounding landscape and architectural features. Neglecting them always results in disoriented or characterless gardens."
Access is from above. The service spaces of the house are underground. The property is accessed from the upper road through a series of filters. Once past the surrounding wall, a patio makes it possible to park cars. A second access leads to the pergola: real "green" rooms, a sort of replica of the living area, where you can cook, sit at the table and converse. Even the windows are designed by plants. Nothing yet suggests that he will be on the roof of the house. It is the anteroom where you can choose how to enter the house: with a direct staircase, with the lift or continue along the external path of the garden. The simplicity of the design and the perceptive stripping of the technical thicknesses of the slabs try not to betray the desired scenographic deception of creating a building that is perceptively legible like a winter garden. The entrance floor of the house is filled with only light and landscape, while the floor below is made up of shadow and some glimpses of sky and sea.
