Artifice and Nature

With its close proximity to the historic attractions of Venice and its golden sandy beaches that are highly popular with tourists, Jesolo strategically combines two elements of outstanding beauty. This makes it an ideal location for an architecture that respects both the natural environment and the profound Vitruvian spirit of venustas, the beauty that Andrea Palladio amongst others was always careful to maintain. Ca’ Silis is an important residential complex (consisting of buildings with various functions including apartments, shops and public green spaces) extending over a fourteen hectare site located within a wide loop of the river Sile, which flows through parkland of around seventy thousand hectares. Amongst well-designed buildings that combine high standards of construction with high-quality commercial aesthetics, two buildings stand out for their strong focus on solutions of particular design quality. The buildings have two functional levels: the ground floors devoted to commercial spaces; the first floors for residential use with medium-sized apartments featuring solutions based on technologically advanced materials while keeping alive the local tradition of terracotta as the most widely used material. In this case terracotta is used in conjunction with cutting-edge installation systems. The facades of the entire complex are clad with various types of terracotta elements including thickness plates, decorative tiles and shaped extrados strips. These features are intended to meet eco-friendly design criteria by optimising the bioclimatic characteristics of the building and thereby assuring energy savings on the blind facade while at the same time reducing the direct influx of natural light in the solar screen sections. The use of glass with metallic connecting parts for structural surfaces (such as the distinctive wave-shaped cantilever roof) makes for a minimally invasive loadbearing structure, a sophisticated architectural detail with outstanding graphic impact. The architects have also skilfully designed some of the façade surfaces, splitting them up through the use of horizontal cuts and various values of interlinear spacing to create a formally composite architectural envelope consisting of mixed elements. The result is a protective screen made of terracotta elements with “litos” and “ground” finishes mounted by means of a mechanical system. The terracotta components are combined with other elements such as the large street-front windows that guarantee luminosity and visibility and the large glass and steel cantilever roof that delimits the building. The terracotta elements supplied by Sannini Impruneta are pre-washed with descaling acid detergent to remove efflorescence (a characteristics of this natural material) and treated with a siloxane microemulsion-based protective impregnating agent.