area bertalia-lazzaretto | bologna, italy

The typical Bolognese terracotta brick was born in the 12th century. Hence Bologna’s technical supremacy in the production of high-quality terracotta bricks. Bologna is also the city of San Petronio: the largest brick Gothic church in the world never completed for various reasons. It is from the memory of this cultural and iconographic background that derive the main design choices of our project whose architectural ‘presence’ is the result of the material and cultural intersection of the two pivotal materials in the city’s history: wood and brick.
The building program envisions the construction of a place endowed with identity and genealogical character, that is, a character in which its users/inhabitants are able to identify themselves, a condition that is nowadays forgotten in contemporary urban conurbations. The two materials selected are both endowed with a great deal of character and have the capacity to evoke, especially in their mutual interaction, the noble history of the city of Bologna, of which they aspire to become a new piece through a new Italian ‘weave.’

Authors: Gianluca Peluffo and Partners, conrad-bercah architects, ENGEKO srl (Enginering)