The planned intervention concerns a building consisting of two different parts connected by a lower body and located in Mirandola. The building is located in the historic centre, near two squares: Piazza Castello and Piazza Guglielmo Marconi; the area is characterized by strongly differentiated buildings with quite conflicting features. Buildings that have maintained their historical characteristics in terms of raised elevation, geometric shape, plastered exterior finishes, wood board shutters, and painted iron railings, are flanked by much more recent ones, characterized by fair-faced concrete parts, roller shutters, small balconies and other features that are not consistent with the typical characteristics of the historic centre. This lack of unity is not necessarily a negative element, but in fact it represents the flowing of time, historical moments, movements and changes that citizens have experienced over time and which have given birth to the modern city, for better or for worse.
Therefore, this project wants to be inspired by a characteristic that can be found in the surrounding buildings: continuity combined with discontinuous elements. The aim is to preserve the building located to the north end, while demolishing and completely rebuilding the one to the south end, which has already been partially demolished by the Fire Department.
The existing building is covered by a plastered coating, painted in the traditional colours of the historic centre and of the historic building tradition of Mirandola, preserving therefore a front design which mainly develops vertically. Each front presents portals made with a coat backing of a few centimetres, which also develops slightly below the upper portion at the eaves. The existing windows are widened to become full-height; they present a really regular development on the front, and are equipped with external aluminium roller shutters painted with colours that match those of the front. The base body, as it usually is in historic buildings, is highlighted by a different colour and characterized by a sequence of horizontal joints.
The new building has a substantially regular and rectangular shape and consists of a ground floor and three upper floors. Being a newly constructed building, we think it is important to enhance it from an architectural point of view, also considering its strategic location near the historic square. The building is characterized by the vertical partitions of the openings, which are interspersed with slightly rotated and jutting mirrors, and then unified by continuous horizontal stools both on the architrave and at the windows. This attempt to play with volumes characterizes the building and brings it back to a more rigorous and contemporary volume. The shadows generated by these volumes produce a variable texture at every hour of the day, and therefore represent the many characters and situations that building transformations have determined on the surrounding existing buildings. A slight elevation of the eaves line allows to give continuity with the other horizontal elements, and particularly with the existing building to be restored, so as to strengthen the perception of a unitary complex. One of the elements that clearly enhances the continuity between the buildings is the way the whole basal band is finished; as it happens in many buildings of the historical centre, this part will consist of plaster and the horizontal joints will have a darker colour compared to the one used on the fronts. The two buildings are inserted in the urban context as a unitary element thanks to the use of the same type of coat rendering and the uniform painting composed by few colours, which aim at enhancing the various architectural sections. The roof is a sloped tile roofing, with downspouts and exposed copper gutters. The windows of the shops on the ground floor are made with thermal cutting iron frames of reduced size and painted in dark shades of grey. The windows of the fronts are underlined by the marked and jutting volumes placed between one row and another.
Therefore, the building acts as a "wing" of the historic square without drawing too much attention, but is inserted in a mimetic way in the existing context. Despite this "hiding" attempt, some architectural features of the new building area stand out as new elements, underlining that the history of the city and of its inhabitants keeps going on.