Coscienza Intuitiva

The Architectural Association, AA School of Architecture, London

Project idea

Coscienza Intuitiva / The tower of Palermo’s Phenomena.

A tower of Compilation. An architectural representation of the current Palermo Phenomena.
A new form of public space conceived as a cross-breed between a Time-City Arkhêion and a Street Market.

An aggregation of fragments, of ruins and embodied cultural identities. A public space that both generate and digest forms of Beauty, moving from antiquity to popular culture.

Interrogating on architecture reality; on the acceptance of the friction between the perpetual Uncompiuted state of a building, and the architects’ idealized version of it, as the infeasibility of the ideal concluded work.

A project that challenges the temporariness of Architecture and its language, the acknowledgment of its constant mutation as a reflection and representation of the city itself, its complexity, richness and incompleteness.

A perpetual unconcluded building in a city of unfinished.

Project description

Coscienza Intuitiva / The tower of Palermo’s Phenomena.

A tower of Compilation. An architectural representation of the current Palermo Phenomena.
A new form of public space conceived as a cross-breed between a Time-City Arkhêion and a Street Market.

An aggregation of fragments, of ruins and embodied cultural identities. A public space that both generate and digest forms of Beauty, moving from antiquity to popular culture.

A project in constant process of transformation.
Never finished, never concluded, unstable and in persistent mutation.

A proposal that pursues the friction between the Uncompiuted state of a building, and the architects' idealized version of it. Therefore how through this friction, the city could come back to the project.

A reflection of its grain, its amplification. A vessel of values and identities. As a mirror of the society and its perpetual alteration.

Located in the historical city center of Palermo, precisely at Piazza Caracciolo, the core of the ancient Vucciria Market which once extended through the neighboring streets.

Once, because nowadays the historical Site has been encountered a degradation process, as almost the entirety of the Palermo city center. Site in which the project has its origin.

Evolved by looking into architectural beauty, Therefore defining a relationship between beauty and culture. In which Palermo, the Symposium.

Where architectural languages are not fixed, not preconceived, but are the consequence of temporal and cultural adjustments.
A stacking of plans and typologies as a stratification of culture which defines its own beauty, the hybridization of continuous exchange and contamination, which reflects in its unique architecture.

A compilation, a stacking of the clashed Palermo Ruins and unbuilt. Where Elements are accumulated and displayed in different ways, from cladding to holes and compound, up to full mass. An amalgamation of elements, typologies, materials, and languages.
Challenging architectural languages by merging masonry mass techniques with new technologies, amalgamating ruins and fragments into several material compounds.
Exploring post tensioning structures, concrete hollowed and reinforced element, trying to challenge the current construction notions by introducing artifacts as building material.

Trying to define a new architectural language based on the amalgamation and supercollection.
A language as an evolving vessel, in which the society outproducts identified as objects of daily consumption, artifacts of the banality, will collide with ruins and fragments, embodying historical and cultural value.
A visual Clash in which this direct combination highlights value and contraddiction, a diffferent layer and therefore a new interpretation.

Depicting moments and events, through society outproducts such as toys, meme and figures and amalgamating them with ruins coming from the current Palermo Remains.
Highlighting the value of the leftover and at the same time scuplting a reminiscence of specific junctures in time.

A vision of the contemporary not constrained by the strength of history but which uses the same as a material for its regeneration.

A Street Market as a public space of social and cultural collision, intended to redefine collective construction.
A tower as a fragmented repository of culture and identities, enhancing the value of the leftover and its own beauty.

An ambitious and speculative project, Tackled at different scales. Which challenge alternative materialities and reevaluate lost techniques.

Interrogating on architecture reality; on the acceptance of the friction between the perpetual Uncompiuted state of a building, and the architects’ idealized version of it, as the infeasibility of the ideal concluded work.

A project that challenges the temporariness of Architecture and its language, the acknowledgment of its constant mutation as a reflection and representation of the city itself, its complexity, richness and incompleteness.

A perpetual unconcluded building in a city of unfinished.

Technical information

A loop of scanning, casting, carving and trading, in which the exchange itself influence the tower construction, as well as the tower physiognomy influence the market life.

The addition of load, through the compile of objects and ruins, will achieve a vertical growing as well as an overall structural stability.
Increasing its relationship with the city.

Therefore a growing architecture that is affected in time and configuration.

A compilation process that visualizes the complexity of the current digital age, its fragmentation and acceleration, the accumulation and ubiquity of objects and images.
Where the denial of the single image brings to assemblages in which the elements are no longer separable but rather become part of multi-layered networks.

A gradient tower of mass, between stacking and transitioning.
Identified by a transitions of languages that reminds to the contextual architectural contamination and meet the masonry structural principles.

A continuous vertical journey, not estranging the Palermitan concept of the market, ingrained in the streets.
But embracing it and trying to define spatial conditions though a continuous vertical circulation, carved into the thick walls of the masonry structure.

A growing process that starts with the batching of the Ruins and the act of building upon them.

A penetrable space blended within the existing square and opened towards its surrounding.
A Market that from the streets, catalyses and vertically continues.

Enclosed by vertically inetrconnected spaces.
A doubled layer structure, identified by a central structural core and ephemeral mutable facades.
The central core will be idetified as a continuos vertical Arkhêion.

Inspired by the masonry configurations of Gothic Towers.
Conceived as the physical and architectural representation of Palermo it self, its reflection and contagion, its constant mutation not only expressed by its architecture, but through the act of exchange and contaminate, as optimal depiction of Palermo’s nature.