“The Olympia Vessel. A Model-Type Sport Infrastructure for Genoa.”
Thesis Project
Prof. Massimo Galluzzi with Francesca Milani
The today’s settlements more often addressed to a multi-scalar sustainability of the interventions, as well as the exhausted liminal spaces belonging to a stratified future, are here assumed as scenery for a Mediterranean culture always housed somewhere-else, or a milieu for the “broken landscape” of Genoa-Foce district. The proposal, addressed to arrange a fragmented geography, is designed to re-establish linkages between maritime infrastructures usages and licentiousness of seaside resorts, and between vehicle’s fast runs and the lingering of the walks, in a no-man’s land hosting educational or hospitality –facilities for a site where the very lowliest serving-utility relics, are next to Monasteries.
A place suspended between Sea and Ground, East and West. A ubiquitous scene characterized by the peculiarity of the shore-line and by the historical of the palimpsest, always back-yard for something-else: a terrain in the back of city for having deposits, the rear of the Coast to house Bathing-facilities, Fair-ground and Ship-yards, the underneath of the light-house listed as No. 1575 at E.F. register; neither the mouth of Bisagno creek, a little beyond for its outlet to the sea, nor the aristocratic sea-side. Sofia Loren or Rosanna Schiaffino and the “Dolce Vita” Times, are vanishing pictures as well as are the very first Origins of the place, still waiting for a non-started restoration: a broken promise yet available with-in the holy of the Sea and the roughness of its people.
Finally, the project-design planned detects the footprints remained, offering to the Easter part of city its own recreational vessel: agora during week, stage on the days devoted to Olympia, the infrastructure here depicted, looks back to the tradition of the Italian Modernism and its monumental attitude, playing with the newest of the military ships and their “cubist” shapes. On the yard, seashore for a stand among the lands, as the etymology of Mediterranean whispers, the water-reflection softly touches the bilge-blocks of a keel, always and ever awake to leave docks.
