Restoration

Giovanna per il Madagascar Onlus is an NPO active in Madagascar for 20 years now. More specifically it operates in Nosy Be island, assisting children affected by diabetes and limb malformations. Since Madagascar is characterized by high poverty and low literacy rates, the NGO is undertaking a new mission to help abandoned children, providing them a home where to sleep and where daily meals are available, a place where they can be treated by doctors and a community where they can study and play.

The existing property consisted of a Grade 2 listed double fronted Victorian house.  Connected to the house was a disused cattle shed and beyond that a ruin, which was a former parchment factory and a scheduled monument.  The client’s initial brief was to convert the cattle shed and demolish the ruin to make way for a new extension. From the beginning of the design process, it was clear that the client viewed the ruin as a constraint as opposed to a positive asset that could in fact be celebrated through a sensitive but well-conceived intervention. 

After widespread interventions of restoration undertaken since the early 90 ‘s, 2012-2015 covered the restoration and consolidation of certain portions of the main external walls of the Castle (sailing North, Savoy bastion minor), the recovery of the main open spaces that surround it in diffuse form the complex, the establishment of a system of trails that leads the visitor to discover different points of perception of landscapes that surround the monument. The “value” of the Castle is the close relationship between Castle and place where it fits. A relationship was so charming by bringing Claude Monet repeatedly to visit Dolceacqua and capture bridge and Castle in a famous painting by 1884 housed in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.

An intervention of an existing building to accommodate travellers visiting Mérida, Yucatán. The work is located 150m from one of the main avenues “Paseo Montejo” and very close to the historic centre of the city. The architectural response seeks to restore and to leave evidence of the passage of time affecting the building. The impression of time is preserved by scraping the walls in order to show the different colours they have gone through, by preserving the oxides of the metalworks and by recycling and recovering doors and windows.

In the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto, the wrecking ball continues to swing. The wooden townhouses that give the city so much of its atmosphere are disappearing at a rate of about 800 machiya a year.