Architecture for Heritage 2021 Edition
Design of a Pavilion for Villa Imperiale
The workshop, carried out in collaboration with the Castelbarco Albani family, current owners of Villa Imperiale and tutored by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, was focused on a place of delight for intellectuals and artists in every age: Villa Imperiale has been, over the last years, at the centre of a refined cultural design oriented to generate in loco one of the most significant centres of artistic experimentation of the national context. In this sense, various concerts, exhibitions, and installations found in the Villa complex their frame, catalysing thoughts and visions of different interpreters of the contemporary thought. Hence, the workshop has required the design of a new pavilion, oriented to host different events, in a refined and unprecedented relationship between modernity and historical architectures. A picturesque context surrounded by the greening of the park, that - slightly East - crash into the sea (San Bartolo mount), Villa Imperiale has been the ideal background for design reflections that combine memory, nature, and contemporary interventions.
Villa Imperiale
Villa Imperiale is located a few kilometres away from Pesaro, immersed in the andscape of the Natural Park of the mount San Bartolo that protects its original relation with nature. An ancient residence of the Sforza in the sixteenth century, it was enlarged and frescoed at the behest of Della Rovere duchies in the sixteenth century by the architect Girolamo Genga, from Urbino. Its splendour faded for a long period, from 1631 to the nineteenth century, when the Villa passed to the Albani family, joined with the Castelbarco family. Thanks to the care and to the restoration of thenew owners, it has been possible to return to the ancient splendour of the residence. Villa Imperiale is considered one of the most amazing works of Italian Renaissance. Composed of two very different buildings, connected by a hanging hall, the old fifteenth century villa and the new wing, entirely of Roveresque construction, it shows itself as a terraced architecture leaned to the slopes of the hill and characterized by a sequence of courtyards, gardens and terraces.