PLACE
Collodi, Pistoia

STATUS
Achieved

CHRONOLOGY
2005 - 2007

CATEGORY
Landscape, public space.

The "Casa delle Farfalle" is the only reconstruction intervention within a wider programme of recovery and functional redevelopment of the historic complex of Villa and Giardino Garzoni in Collodi.

The pre-existing greenhouse, of which some easily identifiable morphological elements remain, is revived through the preservation of the central stepped axis, used as an ascending and descending route, the order of the steps, the stone wall to the north-east and the side wall to the south-east.

The project has two main themes: the adaptation of new play and exhibition functions in a historical space of great architectural and cultural value, and the desire to identify strategies for dialogue between the historical heritage and contemporary architecture.

The building, designed to house, catalogue and display an important range of butterfly species, is inspired by the function and tradition of Tuscan greenhouses and consists of a glass prism, the greenhouse-museum, and an opaque cubic body, the services. This building is shifted with respect to the main front of the greenhouse and oriented according to the axis of the garden.
The two volumes are realised through a material contrast between the transparent structure that constitutes the shell of the greenhouse, and the load-bearing wall system, covered in stone, of the services volume characterised by a further contrast between different materials, stone and metal.

The shell of the ground volume, both in the verticality of the infill and in the horizon of the roof, is made of structural glass, and this transparency is also underlined by the load-bearing structure made of a system of pillars to which the steel beams supporting the roof are attached.

On the eastern side, the envelope consists of an exposed reinforced concrete slab, inside which two glass "cuts" frame the view of the Tuscan hills, emphasising the perspective points.

The internal organisation of the complex is designed so that the greenhouse-museum can be visited by means of a route that winds initially inside the opaque volume, then continues inside the greenhouse between the tanks containing tropical vegetation, and ends on the belvedere located above the opaque cube.