SFERA Archivio dei prodotti della Ricerca dell'Università di Ferrara

Haymah

TESSARI A;BANDIERA M

2016

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Abstract

Building in the desert can mean a highly attractive and suggestive experience. The desert, that place which gathers in the same geography maximum naturality and artificiality, lacks completely and utterly any trace of apparent life, visual references or scale. Therefore it is a field of action outstanding on account of its neutrality, an almost abstract territory. At the same time, no context imposes such a clear and direct relationship with nature: sand, air and light, elements by themselves capable of making up a landscape full of poetry and tragedy. When we think about the most suggestive and inspiring concepts we have handled during our project research, that of the nomadic tent usually comes to mind: an extremely thin veil able to draw a space, laying down a limit between the outer world and the inner one. The tent is configured as a basic system which responds accurately to a habitable request, being at the same time structure and ornament. It is built up with essential techniques and it is also settled spontaneously in the geography of the desert, turning the most definitively inhospitable place into a protected shelter. Its poor external appearance contrasts with the internal one, full of precious fabrics and a soft light that creates a mystic atmosphere. The nomadic tent stands out through its resistance to extreme weather conditions of wind and sun, as much as through its precariousness. As a result, it is an ephemeral construction, able to host life and dreams without the necessity of permanence. The wide range of suggestions and contradictions emanating from this minimal form of architecture creates the most efficient synthesis of our project sensibilities. The haymah encourages us to think of an open architecture to society and simultaneously intimate and emotional. It reminds us of the necessity of an architecture able to relate itself with the place naturally while keeping its own formal independence. It tells, eventually, how to build architecture with restricted manners of expression while forgetting neither the sense of mystery nor the immaterial worth of the unexpected.