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Asymptote has been commissioned to design a new cultural project on the outskirts of the Tuscan hill town of Peccioli Italy. Peccioli is a pre renaissance hill town in the Province of Pisa, located about 50 kilometers southwest of Florence. The ‘Parco Degli Angeli’ (Park of Angels) Master Plan and architectural works by Asymptote include a collection of new buildings and parkland, a large covered 800-seat amphitheater and various interactive sculptural features.

 

The interventions target an intimate form of urbanism that is grafted onto Peccioli and creating a new edge condition set against the spectacular surrounding Tuscan countryside. The building components include a new Museum of Etruscan Antiquities, a Center for Tuscan Food and Wine Culture (Centro di Cultura Enogastronomica) and a new community-based Music Center and Music Instrument Museum. Each building component, landscape intervention and art work is designed as a being transformative by way of utilizing kinetic skins, and complex geometries and that along with light luminous materials make up the main palette of components and aspects that make up the master plan strategy.
 

The architecture and terrain as conceived by Asymptote target the creation of new event spaces and public areas that are also carefully woven into the Tuscan environs and serve to evoke a powerful sense of place, history and timelessness. The demure and fascinating vistas of articulated hilltop towns and their unique and permanent metaphysical presence on the distant horizons greatly impacted the approach to the designed components that make up the master plan. Also an approach to coloration and certain painterly aspects set against the outlying rolling terrain composed of vineyards, olive trees and vast swaths of farmland were of great influence.

 

The ‘Parco Degli Angeli’ is designed to be both an elegant 21-century addition to Peccioli and a dramatic insertion into the Tuscan landscape being in dialog with a deep and resonant cultural history. Along with these various building components there are a number of interesting landscape features and specific places designed for repose, meandering and contemplation, all taking full advantage of the spectacular setting in which the project is situated. For these finer grained aspects of the project, Asymptote took conceptual and artistic queues and inspiration from the interplay between the natural and manmade, a preoccupation seen in the design of Italian Baroque gardens.
 

The paving and mannered of the ground surfaces and materials for example, were designed to evoke and recall (through abstraction) the intricate mathematical patterning and geometries at the root of Florentine renaissance architecture and engineering, particularly the within the works of Paolo Uccello and Da Vinci in respect to the geometric and in terms of the compositional and coloration used by painters such as Fra Angelico Piero della Francesca and Jacopo Pontormo. The key designed structures that make up ‘Parco Degli Angeli’ are each in and of themselves unique approaches to solving not only tectonic and formal preoccupations but are also the result of environmental design issues and drivers.
 

The collection of buildings and spaces, which include a large covered amphitheater, predominantly clad in a translucent gossamer fabric, serves to filter, transform and harness natural light and the energy it produces. The covering is designed as a kinetic and intricately transformable shell structure, pouted with photo voltaic and therefore able to respond to subtle changes in daylight. The architecture of the canopy being developed as apertures set within directional funnels is able to redirect breezes and wind and airflows appropriately to the space beneath. This intelligent and reactive skin is also able to open and close according to need, therefore repelling rainfall and ‘shutting down’ during inclement weather.
 

This intelligent and ‘responsive skin’ is being designed in collaboration between New York and Stuttgart with Trannsolar Environmental Engineers and structural engineers Knippers Helbig. The ‘Parco Degli Angeli’ as conceived by Asymptote is a unique opportunity to incise into a remarkable and historically loaded context a work that makes evident the possibility of confronting the remarkable past with a provocative and inspired future. This theater, museums and parkland are not designed as a confrontational stylistic work, but rather as architecture of accompaniment, where technology and tectonics act at the service of beauty, uniqueness and newfound fascination. Source: Asymptote Architecture
 

Location: Peccioli, Italy
Architects: Asymptote Architecture
Architecs In Charge: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Project Director: Mo Zheng, Paul Mecomber. Rob Eleazor
Project Team: Matt Slattery, Ivy Wang, Natalie Hein
Local Architects: Heliopolis 21 Architects
Structural Engineers: Knippers Helbig Advanced Engineering Stuttgart Germany
Environmental Engineers: Transsolar Stuttgart Germany
Renderings: Damjan Minovski, Vienna Austria
Year: 2014