Walicow Project • Spolia
Architectural Design Studio 5a - Professors Guido Morpurgo & Annalisa de Curtis / February 2019- June 2019
team:
Simone Baccaglini, Alessandro Coccioni, Isabella D'Agostin
Our proposal for the project arise from a consideration: today whoever is walking along Ulica Walicow remains at list astonished by the deep morphological difference between the block and the surrounding city. The work of destruction, planned by the Nazis, was aimed for delate praising memory. The only way to regain possession of memory is to be aware of the events that have taken place. At the same way in Ulica Walicow we have to understand that we can’t limit ourselves to what we see, but there is more, a substrate which hold together the entire block. With our project we’ve tried to make it understandable and return it at the city. The purpose is to create a progressive awareness of this Unicum, starting from the reactivation of the existing buildings, in particular the use of courts, which became opportunities for the city, and the creation of a promenade to hold this buildings together with the ruins. Interventions: the reactivation of buildings 12 and 10 as residences for researchers and artists, the creation of a memorial, a place that speaks for itself, a place that becomes a symbol of collective memory, we’ve worked with a punctual intervention, creating a great suggestion of the absence and the creation of a path that tells the history of the place, in order to increase the awareness of this place. Then we’ve think about the archeological park as a time's sign. The layout of what was, now become a spatial suggestion and a possibility of appropriation by the society. The theatre arise from the story of the morphology of the courtyard buildings. The project works like a traditional theatre but allows the subversion of the "active-passive" relationship between spectators and actors. The stage is locate into the ruins, in order tomake active this area. There is also a reactivation of building 12 which hosting the backstage and offices. At the final we can declare that our project would to increment awareness, confront the absence and restore the memory.
The presence of a substrate that is able to holding the entire block together. The need to make itperceptible again. The materiality of the “surviving” buildings, the open-air section of building 14, the signs of the ghetto wall. These are just some of the themes from which we started trying to outline an intervention strategy that had as its ultimate goal the reappropriation by the city of this block, an impossible task if it is not made perfectly legible before.
The intervention consists of several elements aimed at reactivating the courts of these buildings. Exactly for this reason the design of a flooring has been included, in order to create a homogeneity in perceiving the entire intervention between the Archaeological Park, the Memorial, the reactivation of buildings and Theater.
The theater project arise from the study of the morphology of the buildings' courts, precisely codified in the Warsaw DNA. A series of load-bearing septa become portals, redefining that relationship between structure-court-structure that we have reinterpreted as structure (pillar) - void (occasion) - structure (pillar). The project is a theory of canonical theater (with cavea and stage), trying to reactivate the courts, turning them into foyers and stages (dialoguing with the ruins of the buildings that once stood there). The creation of passages at altitude opens up the possibility of reinterpreting the active-passive relationship between spectator and actor, putting them in communication. There is also the reactivation of a part of the building 12 which completely serve the theater, hosting backstages, offices and inputs for the actors. The exhibition becomes the opportunity to recreate the spatial situation proper to the building (the entrance-court (foyer) -passage-court (stage) can be read in the plan).
