BUILDING

It is a further irony that Modern architects, who can embrace vernacular architecture remote in place or time, can contemptuously reject the current vernacular of the United State, that is, the merchant builders’ vernacular of Levittown and the commercial vernacular of Route 66.

Robert Venturi | FROM LA TOURETTE TO LEVITTOWN

Location: Montecchio, Pesaro Urbino

Year: 2018

Project team: Gabriele Corbo, Jacopo Costanzo, Valeria Guerrisi

Collaborators: Giulia Ines Bianchi, Loriano Giannone, Michelangelo Sicari, Angela Tanzola

The Dramùn is a terraced residential project, halfway between Pesaro and Urbino, which tells the many variations of architectural drawing in our professional activity. A residential complex suspended between suburb and countryside, where we wanted to bring in our drawings a bit of that pop overland atmosphere that we had perceived from the first inspection. The problem, however, was being able to show the project entirely, aware that today, even a large number of valuable images, perhaps cultured collages, could be enjoyed on the web quickly – sometimes superficially – every time we surf network. To respond to these urgencies, we went to study architects who asked themselves questions similar to ours before.

We questioned the happy tradition of comics and photo novels in architecture until we realized that what we were looking for was beyond this field: the pink photo novel. Although simple and predictable, these media have managed to train many housewives in the Italian language over the years. We, therefore, had to write a simple, banal story that would capture even the distracted observer, but at the same time – and in an almost subliminal way – show as many details of our project as possible. We called it the Dramùn – citing an old Super8 that in an ironic and mocking way told about marital infidelity. A story that allows the reader to easily explore the spaces that host it.

The project illustrated provides for fourteen apartments, with different dimensional and distribution characteristics. Six of these, located on the ground floor, can be entered from the private garden, while the remaining eight can be reached via external stairs.
This organization generates a clear difference between the levels of the residential complex, underlined by the treatment of the cladding. In dialogue with the local contemporary vernacular, the upper volumes are shaped and adapted to offer maximum habitability with a degree of mutual independence. Drainpipes, chimneys and external stairways, chromatically dissonant, are the prelude to all the subsequent colonizations that every architecture, becoming inhabited, happily undergoes.