CasAurea | MDSAR Martino Di Silvestro

The apartment is located in a privileged position in the historic center of Syracuse, a few meters from the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. From the balcony of one of the rooms, the two Doric columns of the temple are located a few meters away. The renovation project also affected the load-bearing structures.

The goal of the project was to obtain a second flexible room for a guest bedroom while maintaining privacy; another prerogative of the project was to obtain a living area in the space in front of the temple.

The project was inspired by the philological reading of the urban context.

The temple of Apollo has been reused over the centuries and has undergone many renovations. It was used as homes, a mosque and, finally, it was incorporated into a Bourbon military barracks - a temple brought to light by the archaeologist Paolo Orsi in the early twentieth century. The tympanum of the Temple of Apollo faced east and the fire burned there to direct the ships towards the mouth of the port, in sync with the signaling of the fires of the other temples in the city.

The fishermen's neighborhood, today called Graziella, lies close to the east of the temple on the eastern side of the island of Ortigia. From the railed balcony of Piazza Pancali, you can enjoy the archaeological remains of the ruins as well as from the balconies of Via dell'Apollonion and Via del Mercato.

The real estate unit of the project overlooking the temple is leaning against the Church of S. Paolo to the west and continues to the east up to the crossroads between Via dell'Apollonion and Via Dione, a street which was the axis of the urban plan of the Greek colonists.

The project, which involves the use of poor materials, is inspired by the colors of the stones of the temple and by the possible conjectural references to the vernacular architectural interventions undergone during the centuries of decline of the city; probably there have been successive interventions carried out with the most disparate materials: mortar, stone, iron, fabric, stone.

The Byzantine wall of the temple, today only a fifth of inter-column filling, becomes a reason for conceptual inspiration for the distribution and formal choices of the spaces of the renovation project: a screen with two terminal sliding doors, without visible structures for sliding , form a delta that allows the room crossing the apartment to be used as a bedroom - The small vault of this room is plastered with an exaggerated materiality and in antithesis to the nineteenth-century decoration techniques of the building. The departure from the linguistic canons of the building reference of the property allows us to fantasize about the site, the history and the time in this urban node of the thousand-year-old city.

The room on the temple is separated from the rest of the apartment by a full-height wall which becomes half-sliding; an idea that wants to insist on the idea of linguistic displacement of the proposed architecture and that wants to give magnificence and weight to the internal spaces. This choice is also intended as a reference to the cell of the temple and to the continuous and linear construction element of the wall and as the antithesis of the cell, its closure, a portal. This dividing solution is also covered in the poor fabric of the delta-séparé of the intermediate compartment, allowing the use of all the rooms as envisaged in the initial intentions; the intimacy of the two sleeping areas.

The large sliding portal also generates an open-air filter-corridor area, intended for the dressing room for guests of the flexible room, it also allows access to the bathroom and circulation, without disturbing, up to the kitchen, in the first entrance room.

The kitchen, stripped down even in its colors, has a hybrid hob solution, looks like a reception desk and serves to mitigate the multifunctionality of the space itself: entrance, kitchen and dining room.

Most of the furnishings in the apartment are handcrafted and custom-made, such as: the lamp on the dining table named “mercurio”, the dining table, the accessories in the dressing room and wardrobe, the low tables and the kitchen furniture.