Fenice is a proposal for the renovation of a real estate complex located on the edge of the urban center of Asti.
The building complex is located at the intersection of two important city streets, immersed in a residential fabric characterized by discontinuity between tall buildings facing the street and lower buildings set back, sometimes isolated, within the lot, without a unique and identifying conformation.
The building complex is located within this area, consisting of two similar buildings, with 5 and 6 floors above ground, mainly residential with a shared garage located below ground level. The two buildings were designed and built in the early 1960s, with a unique building typology and aesthetic and formal characteristics: the overhanging volume of the upper floors, the brick cladding, the prominent double-pitched roof.
Over the years the complex has fallen into neglect. In addition to the lack of maintenance, which has caused extensive damage to the roofing and facade cladding, a condition of illegal occupation of the spaces of the entire complex has taken over.
All the environments are now severely degraded, starting from the internal courtyard used as a landfill, passing through the overcrowded apartments and the basements used as common dormitories and receptacles of insalubrity and crime. This condition, which has continued for years, has determined negative repercussions throughout the neighborhood, which today finds itself in great difficulty due to the complex usability of public spaces.
It is clear that an intervention on this complex is delicate and at the same time necessary for the rebirth and regeneration of an extremely complex urban place.
With Fenice we intend to renovate the real estate complex according to a contemporary philosophy in which the common spaces are seen as an extension of the private residence and where the residents themselves have a genuine interest in keeping their home and their family's life in order.
The project consists of the energy requalification and the renovation of the appearance of the two buildings while maintaining the typology and formal characteristics intact. It was decided to preserve the historical traces without distorting their appearance to promote psychological acceptance by the residents of the neighborhood and in this way make them participants in the regeneration of their environment.
The fundamental fulcrum is the new square inside the two buildings that becomes accessible from both streets and is transformed into a children's park and a heat island characterized by a bioclimatic greenhouse and climbing green walls that virtually connect the individual apartments with the new public space. The interior spaces of the building are completely renovated by reducing the number of apartments by virtue of a smaller number of residents. The ground floors are renovated with commercial spaces with large windows that create continuity between the internal garden and the public street. The service spaces such as the garage, cellars and attics are restored and reorganized in favor of an actualization of their uses.
The idea of regeneration also involves the creation of a real estate complex with the characteristics of the Casaclima R protocol. The new buildings will have a renewed casing consisting of a thermal coat to resolve thermal bridges and a wooden cladding alternating with steel uprights. The new skin will allow for the modifications to the load-bearing structure to be reduced to a minimum and the passage and parking of the technical shafts will pass through the outside of the building. The air conditioning system will be completely redesigned to update the real estate units to the new functions and to reduce the building's energy footprint.