Come scale tra cielo e mare

The proposal presents a series of different interventions that share the same design concept: returning an abandoned territory to the iconography it belongs to.

The area of intervention lies between a small coastal town in Western Liguria (Italy) and a tourist port, in a strip of hilly terrain, reaching the sea by insinuating itself between two urban expansion areas of the 1960s-1970s, where the characteristic terraced landscape still survives.

Dry stone terraces, originally intended to be planted with olive trees and open air cultivations, have been covered in the recent past years with greenhouses to follow the floriculture boom.

The irreversible decline of the floricultural market and the development of seaside tourism have led to the progressive abandonment of agricultural structures and, on the other hand, to an increased residential demand, causing a strong exploitation of the coastline and a severe degradation of the hilly territory.

The different areas of intervention were interpreted as part of a single project, as pieces of a puzzle.

The conversion of the abandoned agricultural areas into places for modern and sustainable living has occurred by choosing to use underground volumes as the only typology, entirely inserted in terraces and with a single view.

These buildings, entirely covered with earth, renew the way of "living on the sea" by rewriting the architectural language. A synergistic project of valorization of the environmental context that allows the re-permeabilization of the soil, reduces the consumption of land and reconstitutes, through a mending operation, the typical terraces of the Riviera di Ponente, restoring the landscape to the archaic forms based on the union of the elements: air, earth and water, as man imagined in the past, as "stairs between sky and sea".