International Contest for the Three Threshold at Ca’ Corniani. Clients: Generali Italia – Genagricola spa; concept and landscape curatorship: Andreas Kipar; art curatorship: Elena Tettamanti e Antonella Soldaini. Ca’ Corniani, Caorle (VE), 2017-2019
The great golden roof lends a precious touch to this farmhouse. The work is dedicated to its history and to the people passing through here who will imagine its empty rooms filling up with life again
The work is intended to instill new meaning into the now abandoned structure of Ca’ Cottoni and restore it to the community and to visitors as a quasi-object through which they can explore the place’s past and future.
The project has led to the construction of a new roof to replace the decaying one of asbestos cement that covered the building.
The roof has been designed in gilded sheet metal and is characterized by a modular pattern of small pyramids with a square base that reflect the light in a different way in relation to its intensity and the various possible points of view.
The building of Ca’ Cottoni has always been a part of the estate’s history, housing for many years the local families and the presbytery of the nearby church of La Resurrezione, as well as spaces for work and socialization.
Its architecture—that of a simple and dignified monument in the landscape of the plain—is an image of a piece of the community’s social history, a metaphor for the age-old relationship between the people and the cultivated countryside of Ca’ Corniani.
The large golden roof created for the building on the one hand upgrades its architecture, and on the other gives dignity and value back to an important piece of the place’s emotional landscape, bestowing a new aura on the building.
A caption engraved on a stone slab at its foot, legible from the road that runs past it, invites visitors to picture the sensation and space that surrounds them at that precise moment.
The work of art is a threshold between past and future.
The work touches an architectural object that is already in existence, positioning it, through a simple physical transformation, in the new structure of Ca’ Corniani’s landscaping.
It is a work of architecture that glows brilliantly under the rays of sunshine in the surrounding countryside.