Making Roof | Guglielmo Pozzi

The project is located in a neighbouring area of ​​the border town of Gorizia. The geographical position of the city is strategic because it is located at the point of passage of many goods and people between Eastern and Western Europe. This also leads to problems of a migratory nature. In fact, it is from here that hundreds of migrants of the Balkan route pass, fleeing from countries with major social, economic and cultural problems, trying to reach states such as Germany, France or England.
These people on their way are forced to cross numerous intermediate countries, including Italy. Italian legislation obliges those who are identified and found without documents to stop in the Italian territory and make an application for political asylum, with very long bureaucratic times, often hosted in military structures, but above all blocking the way to their true goal.
The Making Roof project was born from these criticalities, which tends to imagine stopping places for these migrants. As in a mountain path, these shelters can give rest and comfort during their crossing but without forcing them to stay in a place they do not want to live.
Making Roof does not only mean designing the roof in its load-bearing structures, but it also means welcoming people who, forced by negative factors to abandon everything in their lives, find themselves having to face a long journey full of unknowns.
Since the end of the Second World War, the area called Campagnuzza has seen the inclusion of residences for refugees. With subsequent developments and enlargements over the decades.
The lot in question has always been characterized by military constructions and the current state of affairs has six load-bearing masonry barracks with pitched roofs with wooden trusses, arranged vertically with respect to the lot and at a modulated distance between them.
The intervention preserves the original walls, eliminating the now semi-destroyed roofs and replacing them with a complex wooden structure, which is structurally separated from the walls and is characterized by large lamellar beams that “cover” the double unit of the barracks, generating below of them spaces of multipurpose communities, which know how to adapt to the different needs of the time and of the people who use these places.
A fundamental part of the project is the integration with nature that permeates the intervention ground, not creating a barrier with the wood on the west side. The tanks designed in the intermediate passage areas to the barracks serve as mitigation from the torrential rains that occur more and more frequently. A connection space with the city is inserted at the entrance to the lot, providing an endowment to resident citizens that would now be missing: a basketball court.

The project aimed at the insertion of prefabricated housing modules and the design of a new autonomous wooden structure roof which, like a new skin, covers the former load-bearing walls of the barracks.
The interior spaces are divided between a private area at the head of the barracks and a common area, kitchen and living room in the centre of the building, and the bathroom block with showers at the end of the barracks.
The modularity of the project allows the reduction of production costs and dynamic management of the entire project.
These spaces, now used as residential areas, could easily be modified, transformed or demolished in the future, to ensure new functions for the entire building complex.
Fixed, immobile, eternal architecture does not exist.
Architecture is life, and as such, it changes, transforms, moves like the migrants themselves who are possible guests of these spaces.