Exhibitions and Marble Forum: Inside Marmomacc and Abitare il Tempo 2014
11.08.2014
Renzo Piano and Malta: a new stone facade for the New Parliament
In 2008, Studio Renzo Piano Building Workshop began work on the “Valletta City Gate” project which redesigned access to the historic centre of Malta’s capital. The complex of buildings comprises the new Malta Parliament, the Opera House rebuilt from ruins and the new Valletta City Gate.
The project is located in an important area of the capital of Malta close by its famous and impregnable XV century walls; while already protected as a World Heritage Site, there was nevertheless a great need for an architectural and urban re-organisation project. The Studio RPBW project managed to establish dialogue involving the old and new buildings and the gateway to the city. In this dialogue between history and innovation, the choice of local stone for walls and historic buildings played a fundamental role. In the new buildings, stone helped ensure integration with the overall context while equally emphasising them through absolutely innovative applications.
This initiative by Marmomacc seeks to enhance and promote the technical and design aspects of this work by highlighting the innovative use of stone and demonstrating the new technological qualities that can be obtained with this ancient material.
Consequently, Hall 1 will host an exhibition illustrating the history of the project with photos and drawings detailing the facade design process, following the route taken by natural stone from the quarry to the installation site. The exhibition will be flanked by stone elements used in the Malta project in 1: 1 scale to outline the engineering process involved in the details and stone processing.
This fundamental experience in the application of stone materials in a major work of architecture will also be highlighted during Marmomacc by a Round Table with input and testimony by people who worked on the design and development of Valletta City Gate. The intention is to emphasise once again how a project can be a driving force behind innovation and how success was the outcome of dialogue between clients, designers and companies. Speakers at the Round Table will include Studio RPBW designers and consultants, the CFF Filiberti company which produced and installed the stone elements for the external and internal facades and representatives of the Malta Government which commissioned the work.
The Stone House, Emerging Stories
The Stone House is a story through images in a space enclosing and compressing time through memory and imagination taking the iconic shape of a house; a set-up that develops along a ribbon finished with mosaic tiles that define the living space.
In the middle, blocks being processed, homes/steel anvils capable of generating artistic mosaics; an empty space narrating a path leading up to a “departure”.
Stone has always fascinated mankind and civilisations, coming to be attributed with virtues, meanings and magical powers.
The House represents the sensation of personal comfort and well-being with ourselves and the outside world, it embodies safety, protection and a point of reference since remote caveman times.
Caves inhabited by men who felt the need to “fill” their “homes” with signs and drawings that narrated their story. The meaning of safe haven soon also embraced the space where they could explain what was important to them, becoming expression, story-telling and mirror for affection, symbolic and community content: a reflection of their world.
The House represents our roots, our memory, Stone our imaginations.
The Stone House is the ancestral space, echo and container of our world: the hearth.
The articles in the Stone House are traces of memory, summaries of steps in our history: facts and events of our past as a result of a mnemonics, uncritical investigation, the ‘emerging stories’ that combine stone with raw materials to trace fragments of evolutionary memories.
The project envisages a main partner which will implement the set-up and finishing of surfaces with artistic mosaics, a series of companies working together to exhibit crossways and narrative objects made up of stone (from Carrara White to lava stone) and other materials (silver, minerals, steel, iron, leather, skins, porcelain, stoneware, crystal, brass) and a technical partner for load-bearing steel structures.
