Terravolante
The Besnate party pavilion, inaugurated in May 2023, was designed during the recent pandemic. Building a place for public meetings and festive events was therefore a sort of challenge to that well-known segregating reality. The place of intervention is a sports centre located in a territorial area close to notable geographical and infrastructural traces such as Lake Maggiore and Malpensa airport. The pavilion, approximately 330 sq. m. covered, had to be something easily erected, economical and at the same time solemn and representative. To define its character there are also some singular historical genealogies which have become a reference by choice: on the one hand the pile-dwelling cultures of the Iron Age witnessed by the archaeological sites present in the local marshy basins and on the other the aeronautical culture of the early twentieth century which grew up in the hangars of the nearby “Cascina Malpensa” of Gianni Caproni, legendary founder of Italian aviation. Lightness of construction and a shape referable to an industrial type are then the design outcomes. The structure, containing the kitchen, bathrooms and a large covered room, is conceived as a large wooden hull raised 2.4 m off the ground. The precise and economically advantageous interpretation of the construction mechanics translated into a finished form is the underlying, almost engineering, theme of the pavilion. The roof is defined by large main arches of laminated fir wood (class I, GL28c) which inflect a simple transverse profile with inclined pitches. A veil of wooden slats suspended from the main arches encloses and crowns the raised part of the entire pavilion working statically by traction only.
It is characterized on the outside by a covering of translucent fiberglass sheets which filter sunlight during the day and diffuse artificial light in the evening. The connection to the ground consists of the service block made of "Poroton" type load-bearing bricks and three pairs of coupled laminated wood columns on each side. A 7.5-meter overhang marks the main entrance on the south-east end, accentuating the general effect of suspension of the entire structure. If the sports centre of the small municipality has grown as a sum of indoor spaces (the gym and changing rooms) and above all empty spaces (the various playing fields) without a real centre of gravity, the pavilion is placed at the service of all the Centre's activities and also those coming from the city, its associations and its schools with which the project was also shared during the construction site. Like a contemporary "broletto" (mediaeval municipal building), the pavilion is the result of a collective effort that preceded and accompanied the entire process of creating the pavilion and which continues with event proposals that often go beyond the initial hypotheses of use. During the development phases of the project and its construction site, an evocative name was found for this building for public celebrations, the "Terravolante", (literally “flying earth”) a term which in its ambiguity expressed the wealth of references to the places where the pavilion was founded and to his propensity to be the keeper of a genealogy.
