“A. Vittoria” Fine Arts High School

The subject of this competition faces a theme of extraordinary relevance: the reconversion of the more recent existing building stock.
A building with business purpose, only built in 1989, is now intended to host a fine arts high school.
The intervention requires a deep refurbishment through a distributive rearrangement and an adjustment of the general performances (plants and building envelope).
The new building takes the shape of an L body that encloses a one floor high podium following the direction of via Giusti. This podium contains the main entrance, public areas (such as the meeting room and exhibition areas) and the big production workshops.
The cornerstone of the composition is the full height atrium, a large and bright space with wide views of the surrounding landscape. It's a living place, a sort of square (agorà) animated by the movement of the students along the open stairs.
At the upper levels, classrooms are placed in the south wing while laboratories and other functional spaces are in the northern one. Connecting spaces aren't made up of corridors but through generous spaces which are naturally illuminated, provided with fixed furniture and structured in different areas (informal learning, relax, socialization).
The building envelope is characterized by a great simplicity. The heads of the L volume and the side on via Giusti are closed by a continuous plastered wall that develops following a geometric shape based on circle arcs of the same radius. The remaining fronts consist of a double skin facade: the inner side is made up of wide glazed openings with metallic frames while the outer skin consists of micro-perforated metal panel. The shape of these panels and the different level of transparency gives the building envelope a diaphanous look.
Considering the good conservation status of the structures and in order to reach the best sustainability level of the intervention, we intend to preserve the existing slabs, raising them to the requested height with a system of hydraulic jacks and making new anti-seismic connections to the vertical structures.