HOPA Housing Padova | GEZA - Gri e Zucchi Architettura

Living in the countryside while being inside the historical centre. A meeting of two urban realities, the medieval borough and the suburban block of flats surrounded by greenery, marks the birth of a new housing typology: the suspended villas.
The park is the heart of the project. All the dwellings have a living area facing towards the vegetation while the sleeping area is oriented toward the city and the pedestrian access system. Each housing unit has a direct view to the park, highlighted by the fact that the volumes are continuous and very transparent, with wide openings toward the greenery in the living rooms, and a more introspective and closed side in the bedrooms. Each unit becomes a garden house' with a wide panorama towards the new landscape, framed by the villas standing on the roof and by the hanging gardens.
The volume, thought as a single building, it is also capable to respond to the context with precise and really diversified choices. The aim is to ensure an high standard of privacy and quality of living, in relation to the existing buildings and the big green area of the park, maintaining at the same time a connection to context – mostly with via Campagnola – which is neither prevailing nor invasive.
A big storey building with an 'M' plan, having an height of three floors, composes the main structure of the project. To it are added the 'suspended villas', which create a fragmented fourth floor, and the volumes flush with the street on via Campagnola, respecting the shapes of the preexisting buildings. Those 'suspended villa', connected by big terraces with hanging gardens, ensure a perception of the intervention in which the highest storey is not continuous and leave space to the vision of the sky and allows light to penetrate. Moreover this solution reduces the perceived 'scale' of the volume, which in the view from above turns out to be a set of single buildings surrounding a big green area.
On the front towards via Campagnola the buildings uses two elements which are really urban: the fenced – in garden and the porch. In the most compact part of the street, the façade is pulled back expanding the existing garden, achieving a green filter that ensures a better usability of the residential spaces, clears the view and increases the lightness of via Campagnola.
The building, furthermore, recall the preexisting shapes at the corners, gaining a scale ratio more balanced between the urban context and the new residential intervention. The volume standing on the eastern corner of via Campagnola is emptied at ground floor, in order to realize a big entrance porch serving the entire residential complex. This porch almost becomes and urban space, a place where to meet for the new inhabitants that enhance the whole road and that allows the view of the park from the street. This meeting point works as a starting point for the pedestrian accesses, which are surrounded by the shared gardens.
Are anyhow planned pedestrian and vehicular accesses both from the southern side and the northern one, next to the park entrance. All the parking spaces needed by the inhabitants and the visitors are realized in a big underground garage and in a parking lot north, overshadowed by the existing trees. Moreover, the whole building and the private gardens are rose from street level and park level, guaranteeing also at ground floor a correct privacy ratio between public and private spaces.
The design uses preexisting elements from the surrounding urban context (the villas, the storey buildings, the porch, the fenced in garden, the façades made by 'rhytmic' windows), inflecting them in order to realize new and complex relationships and spaces.
The intervention defines a new quality of living that rises from the simple union of the opportunities given by the historical center along with the calm given by a big 'green hearth'.