Architecture for Landscape

The workshop will represent an opportunity for practical synthesis through which all the notions that will be made available through the other didactic modules will be tested, guaranteeing strategic responses to a real architectural project. The workshop, conducted in collaboration with Italkali, will look at the reuse of an old disused quarry in the Petralia Soprana hills, in the heart of Sicily. An outcrop of the mammoth layer of salt that was created millions of years ago in southern Europe by the evaporation of the ancient Mediterranean, the Petralia quarry is a true underground city: not a narrow maze of claustrophobic ravines and gloomy passages, but rather a succession of immense, immaculate halls, punctuated by massive pillars supporting 15 levels carved out of the heart of the mountain, for a total height of over 200 metres. A superlative place of complex description, sculpted by the explosions of dynamite and voracious machines, scratching through immaculate salt to carve twisted and complex geometric motifs that resemble cave writings. The Patralia quarries are truly an alien location, capable of abstracting the visitor from space and time, and not by chance contended - though rarely granted - by the most famous fashion brands and Hollywood productions, for their most exclusive settings and events. In the heart of the Sicilian mountains, in one of the most singular and evocative contexts on the planet, students will have the opportunity to measure themselves against the mystery of an underground landscape, a contemporary result of industrial activities, but a rare materialisation of that 'underworld' that has inspired legends and mythologies of all times.