New town centre and urban square, Casarza Ligure, Genoa

• New town center in Casarza Ligure
• New town center in Casarza Ligure
• New town center in Casarza Ligure
• New town center in Casarza Ligure
• New town center in Casarza Ligure
• New town center in Casarza Ligure
• New town center in Casarza Ligure
• New town center in Casarza Ligure
• New town center in Casarza Ligure
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• New town center in Casarza Ligure
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Our practice has conceived and developed from the first masterplan a residential-tertiary settlement on the left bank of the Petronio torrent, destined to become the new “urban centre” of Casarza Ligure.
With the realization of this Plan, the whole tissue of “Case Nuove” which, starting from the ’60s has expanded on the left bank of the Petronio, besides acquiring a definite and organized arrangement, comes to be completely connected with the rest of the urban tissue and the “ponte nuovo” [new bridge] itself comes to be a hinge between the two centres: the first, coinciding with the old square, in front of the parrish church of S. Michele, and the second, in direct visual connection with the new square surrounded by arcades (piazza Aldo Moro).
The reference for the project of the new square is to be found in the long tradition of the Italian and European post 16th century “architectural squares”, defined by unitary building walls with porches whose buildings are in fact treated like a unitary architecture.
Among the most significant examples, beside those more famous of Venezia, Vigevano, Ascoli Piceno, Firenze, Torino, Madrid, etc., there are a great number of squares realized in minor centres, often almost unknown, concentrated chiefly in the northern and central part of Italy, which on the square itself found their identity. In those cases the square becomes the starting point generating the whole urban tissue, whose substance sometimes is exhausted in the building wall around the public space at the centre: this is in fact where gravitates a great part of the activities which characterize a town centre, from the residential to the commercial ones, to the main collective functions, either civil or religious.
In the project for the new centre of Casarza we have tried to keep into account these experiences in order to recompose, around a central “pole” well defined in its architecture, an urban tissue which, starting from occasional pre-existing situations in the periphery, acquires a greater degree of organization as it comes nearer to the centre of the new settlement.
A strong unitary image characterizes the central nucleus, while the tissue in the east, of recent prevision. and the one in the west, pre-existing, are sort of intermediate between the compact centre and the areas outside the zone of intervention characterized by spontaneous tissues of a loose type.
The square, of a square form, opens toward what is now the town centre and is linked to it by the bridge crossing the Petronio torrent in continuity with the main axis of reference to the project: the whole space occupied has a unitary aspect, thanks to the architectural homogeneity of the buildings surrounding it.
Apart from the lengthwise axis, running on the track of the pre-existing road, the square is organized on a cross-wise axis, orthogonal to the first, coinciding with the pedestrian connexions toward “Case Nuove” in the west, and toward the public gardens in the east. These pedestrian connexions do not imply interruptions in the eastern and western building fronts of the square but they go in through the under-porches, so completing the pedestrian ways of access to the housing and commercial units.
In the extreme south of the square two special buildings, one of them destined to services (Comunità Montana), and the other destined to commercial-tertiary activities, both one storeys higher than the rest of the buildings with arcades, form the architectural conclusion of the urban space.
The residential tissue of the central nucleus of the new settlement consists of a series of block buildings, referring to the local building types: the settling potentialities of the area permit us to form a compact and regular urban tissue such as to give a character of homogeneity to the new centre.
All the buildings have at the basis a space to be used as a garage, open and on “pilotis”, at the level of today’s country-side and corresponding to the estimated suitability for internal traffic.
The ground floor, that is the floor of the pedestrian entrances to the buildings, corresponds instead to the level of the pre-existing roads at a higher level than the country-side: it is at this level that the square and all the pedestrian roads as well as the main nucleus of public gardens have been realized.
In addition to the ground floor lodgings (anyhow one floor higher than the country-side level) to which there is access from the entrance hall of each building, the project provides, according to the case, three or four more storeys destined to housing. The outer trimmings of the buildings are of the traditional type (Genoese plastering, roofs with Marseilles tiles, Genoese window-shutters) and all the buildings show unitary treatment as to colour-wash paint, trimmings and additional elements (as, for example, awnings for balconies, lighting installations, etc.).