Lush hybrid

HOF, Seadquarters of the technical offices of the Municipality of Perugia

Abstract

The redefinition of Palazzo Grossi, previously an educational building built in several stages between 1953 and 1955, to be used nowadays as the site of the Centro Servizi Tecnici for the Comune of Perugia, is due to studio Hof, established by Paolo Belardi and Alessio Burini in 1987. The result shows, once again, that what has been dubbed the ‘Perugia-model’ offers a contemporary and effective answer to the age-old question, to be honest, typically Italian, regarding the setting of contempo- rary works in urban contexts in which the existing architecture has been ‘historicized’. The dialogue between tradition and innovation is an oxymoron which is only apparent because it is truly from focussing on what already exists that the Perugian duo models its planning strategies, giving up in any case any kind of easy captatio benevolentiae that an approach aimed at camouflaging style would ensure.

Respect for the original compositional organisation, in this case in the shape of a courtyard, is not only no kind of restriction, but becomes, for the designers, a resource to invest in terms of environmental quality, positioning and internal distribution, even avoiding any kind of philological reproposition, according to a methodological process that has already been applied, in a more extreme, but equally convincing, version, in the reconstruction of Villa Micheli at Ceccano. In the case of the ex-school building the process of hybridization, radical in its conception as opposed to in its subversive aesthetic value, aims at keeping the existing external installation, so as to preserve the image in the collective memory and the function of landmark, and, at the same time, to ensure the needs of giving a new function, performance and bioclimatics.