Fishermen’s Rest
The project regenerates a stretch of the harbour at Camogli, on the eastern shore of the Golfo Paradiso, in Liguria, Italy. Commissioned by the City of Camogli, gosplan architects has redesigned some 350 square metres of quay along Via Scalo al Porto: the ground, the furniture, and the lighting of a strip of pier where fishermen’s moorings, the flow of tourists, and the everyday life of residents coexist.
The project redefines the geometry of the public space and its relationship with the water, and from that configuration every element follows: the paving in Colombino sandstone slabs and rissëu — the traditional Ligurian pebble mosaic that surfaces church forecourts and small squares — the benches in white-painted galvanized steel and laminated Iroko, and the screen and weathervane disc in Iroko and brass. From the overall design of the quay down to the individual furnishing, everything is the work of the studio.
The project takes shape as a discontinuous sequence of benches: long, low platforms on white frames, set at intervals along the quay and punctuated by the fishermen’s posts. From each, pivoting Iroko backrests rise. One can sit facing the open sea or the village, lie back in the sun, or — as the fishermen do — use the surface as a workbench for mending nets. The same seat accommodates the tourist gazing at the church and the resident unfolding a newspaper at sunset, imposing no fixed posture on anyone. At night, a line of light runs beneath the platform, turning it into a low lantern on the pier.
The benches are set among the dark-wood posts that the fishermen have always used to spread and mend their nets and to hang fenders, lines, and mooring buoys. These pre-existing structures are left in place, and the new furniture appropriates them, establishing a functional relationship with them. It is in this juxtaposition that the project reinterprets — in a public, everyday register — a life still active and bound to fishing, staging the coexistence of the working harbour and the one that is admired.
At one end of the intervention, where the quay opens onto the water, a screen of Iroko slats of uneven height guards the edge with a light touch while also serving as the emblem of the place. Above it, on a white pole, the brass disc of the weathervane catches the wind and turns: a small sun by day, a moon by night, at the head of the pier. Underfoot, the sandstone slabs and rissëu pebbles hold together the new and the memory of the quay, in a continuity of material rather than of style.
In a place that is at once a working harbour and a tourist image, gosplan declines to choose between the two natures. The project’s clearest intention is to hold them together: the fishermen’s posts, nets, and buoys remain, and the new system of benches makes them its own, reinterpreting custom — the habitual gesture of those who come to the pier to work, to read, or to look out — as design material.
Materials, colours, and techniques belong to the history of these places — sandstone, rissëu, wood, brass — and are recast in a restrained, contemporary language, following a recurring signature in the studio’s work: to take root in its context without yielding to the iconic gesture. The result is a minimal piece of civic infrastructure that preserves the industrious character of the pier while restoring to it one of the finest vantage points over the heart of the fishing village.
