Inspired by the various open lodges, or loggia, around the city of Florence, Tethered Pasts takes a step back and yields its image and meaning to the human experience, giving value once again to the person over the object. The project takes a small footprint in the piazza so to preserve the potential life and future function the piazza can serve to the people. Tethered pasts also makes use of an existing build on site and adapts and reuses its shell in order to accommodate a new purpose. Engaging the existing piazza with its four sprawling ribbons, it creates a natural shield to the preserved university buildings and the students who use them. The re-interpreted loggia, or "ribbons", stretch into the site, continuing the horizontal directionality as rendered by the adjacent university wing. The residential buildings opposite the site confront this motion by adding a contrasting characteristic of verticality to the public space. The project shows variations in its roof lines to be a subtle nod to the residences across the way.
Tethered Past:
University of Florence Humanities' Library Addition
Modern cities lack a fundamental connection to their context; Design is outsourced for grandeur, materials outsourced to emancipate capital, connections broke for status. The historic city center of Florence offers a limited opportunity for new meaning and a new beginning for the modern and contemporary ideas to be displayed or written. Until now cities have vigorously preserved their historic centers, allowing for little to no exterior expression or interpretation to re-stitch the delicate historic fabric. Tethered Pasts is to be the first act, the buffer, the stepping stones if you will, to show what the potential can be for historic centers when designers understand and respect their context and fight the modern fundamentals.
The project, being aware of usefulness recognizes the lack of parking in the city, so there is a reduced space parking lot submerged with other programmatic elements of the addition to still accommodate vehicles, but to discourage their numbers as this site will be far smaller and friendlier to bike and pedestrian traffic. Tethered Pasts makes use of an existing build on site and adapts and reuses its shell and basic structural elements in order to accommodate a new programmatic function. The Adaptive Reuse facade holds the memory of what once was and displays where the old connection attached to the face of the building.
