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This project involved creating spaces on a human scale with the people who use the facility able to get involved and make their own contributions. It therefore deliberately broke with the predominant settlement model to prioritize the human experience and the needs of daily life. These craft workshops and socio-educational center in Erba, Italy, earned ifdesign first prize in the 2022 POROTON® Award. Now an integral part of the Noivoiloro Community Center for people with disabilities, the new buildings were designed and built to recast disability in a positive light, while also providing an effective response to the needs of a community that includes, among others, people with autism and cognitive disorders. Its spaces, materials, sounds, lights, and so on were all designed to create a better quality of life for everyone, with people also able to contribute their own ideas to some aspects of the design.
“At first glance, the materials and forms of this project respect the context. But a playful creativity dismantles the initial model and recomposes it in a surprising and radically expressive form,” reads the jury statement of the 2022 POROTON® Award. (The jury was Arch. Orsini; Ing. M.Arch.AA Peralta; and Stefano Midolini, president of the POROTON® Italia consortium.) “The building materials were used in such a way as to strip the architecture back to the bare essentials of each construction element,” continues the statement. “On the workshop façades, the carefully created textures of the black painted POROTON® blocks contrast with the colored transparency of the fiberglass. Meanwhile, the use of the rough finish of exposed masonry gives the center an elegant and domestic feel.”
This is human-centric architecture that makes a break from its local area, which is essentially industrial.
©Andrea Martiradonna, courtesy of Consorzio POROTON®
Able to host up to around 25 people, two angled but communicating buildings with shed roofs house the craft workshops. Besides their distinctive roofs, which allow natural light to enter, the fiberglass façades help define the identity of these structures. Despite its very low cost, the fiberglass effectively protects around fifty linear LED lamps while also allowing them to shine through and illuminate the outdoor entrance area. The children who use the center were able to contribute to this part of the project, working with the idea that the lights, conduit, and junction boxes were like the nervous system of the human body. The boys and girls of Noivoiloro – some with Down’s syndrome, some with autism, and some with post-traumatic disorders – designed the paths traced by the wiring and the positions of the lights, freely creating a two-dimensional model of the façade during a workshop session. To do it, they used wool, matches, and drawing pins to map out what became an expression of their own personalities that was then incorporated into the project. This led to the somewhat radical decision to leave the electrical cables exposed as they trace out their sometimes illogical, sometimes complex paths. The architects set out to respect the original design, even where the path was particularly complicated and unconventional, but, for that reason, highly creative.
The workshops were built using reinforced POROTON® masonry with a veneer of POROTON® blocks. This was left exposed at the back of the building, where the main entrance is located, and finished with colored fiberglass at the front, which overlooks outdoor common spaces. Combined with the exposed POROTON® blocks at the back of the building, which are simply painted black, these cost-saving measures not only contributed to the building’s radical stripped-back look, but also gave room for experimentation with the textures and details of building materials that normally remain hidden.
©Andrea Martiradonna, courtesy of Consorzio POROTON®
The socio-educational center provides group activities during the day that help boys and girls learn while encouraging autonomy. It includes three small offices, a laundry room, a storage area, a furnished mini-apartment, and a kitchen block. Along with its unusual roof, the façades, with their large, differently sized windows, are distinctive features. The external walls are double-leaf and built using POROTON® blocks. They have a plaster finish on the outside but are only plastered in part on the inside, thus creating a pattern between the painted exposed walls and the concrete and masonry roof. The exposed blocks, along with their rough pointing, are the featured elements in an expression of brutalism. Different colors are used to identify different areas of the complex, this also softening its appearance and giving the interior spaces a more welcoming and domestic atmosphere, something that people with autism often relate to. The color palette is also intended to create a feeling of serenity.
©Andrea Martiradonna, courtesy of Consorzio POROTON®
By using exposed POROTON® masonry as a defining feature of the entire building, the project demonstrated the expressive potential of these materials, to the point of even tapping into the acoustic potential of the blocks. This stemmed from ifdesign architects Franco Tagliabue Volontè and Cecilia Cempini’s experience with the Rururban project. This planning and teaching initiative, which focused on remote areas in Latin America, aimed to improve public spaces through workshop sessions, and was supported by Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja in Ecuador and Politecnico di Milano.
Location: Erba, Italy
Architect: ifdesign (Franco Tagliabue Volontè, Ida Origgi)
Structures: Marco Torghiana
Photography by Andrea Martiradonna, courtesy of Consorzio Poroton
