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HOTEL MANAGEMENT SCHOOL IN ARIANO IRPINO


LOCATION Ariano Irpino, Avellino, Italy
YEAR 2017
THEME Architecture, Education spases, Hotel management school
STATUS Competition
DESIGNERS Antonio Monestiroli, Luca Cardani, Giovanni Uboldi


The competition project envisions a hotel and agribusiness school hub of excellence to serve the city of Ariano Irpino and its territory. A building where we learn the ways of hospitality transmitted in some school facilities open to citizens. In short, an architecture that can be traversed by the entire citizenry, which must be involved by its activities not only educational but also of relationship with the public. We have taken the theme of crossing as the main objective of the project, starting with the choice to build a pedestrian path, a street little wider than an alley in the historic city, that bridges the difference in elevation between the upper city of Piazza San Francesco and the lower city of Via d’Afflitto, passing through the school building.

A crossing that connects together the collective places and activities that the school intends to share with all citizens. The strategic place of this school-city connection is the restaurant and the workshops related to its operation. Descending along Via d’Afflitto, the lower city street, one encounters a large pergola placed over the base of a retaining wall, historically intended as the site of the vegetable gardens of the Convent of St. Francis, facing south over the steep landscape. The pergola, which is connected to adjacent rooms, is used as the restaurant’s outdoor venue, but also as a place for meetings and parties. The fact that the restaurant can relate the school to the public and citizens hints at the degree of relationship possible between the building and the city, both from an urban and architectural point of view and from the point of view of social life. The entrance to the more strictly educational part of the school reserved for students and professors is on St. Francis Square, at a higher elevation than that of Via d’Afflitto. St. Francis Square has always been one of the central places of the city, dominated by the Convento di San Francesco and the Palazzo Bevere. The shape of the place has changed profoundly as a result of first the collapse and then the demolition of Convento di San Francesco and the transformation of the church into the pastoral center for youth, which remained isolated in the middle of a large void awaiting a new configuration. The only building left of the old square is Palazzo Bevere, deeply tampered with inside but still recognizable outside. The new school therefore also has the task of giving a renewed dimension to the large urban void where it is located, building with its architecture a large pedestrian public square that separates it from the road that connects the entire upper city for the long. Overlooking the square is the three-story high building, which contains the school’s lobby and offices on the ground floor and classrooms and laboratories on the two upper floors. Concluding the facade on the square on the left appears a tower, which houses three overlapping classrooms that enjoy a very special view of the large roof garden. The tower, massive and clad in stone like the basement on Via d’Afflitto, is meant to be a reminder of the presence there of a convent, with its church and bell tower. In the same building in line on the south-facing side on the roof garden overlooks a long iron and glass veranda that brings air and light to the classrooms and laboratories, opening the view to a hilly landscape that appears boundless. Also on Via d’Afflitto in the basement is a large naturally lit, ventilated atrium that distributes a library, gymnasium and auditorium with related services. In this way also on Via d’Afflitto are the entrances to the public part of the school, which is also easily accessible from Piazza San Francesco, thus reinforcing the sense and cornerstones of the path of crossing the city and architecture on which the sense of this project is built.



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L. Cardani (edit by) Studio Monestiroli  Opere e progetti di Architettura Electa Milan 2021