«The only space of its kind in Bologna, we celebrated the experience of San Barbaziano with a project open to the city», explain architects Federico and Caterina Poggioli. «The choice of authentic materials and formal simplicity express a dialogue between the present and the historical memory of the building, with an intervention that enhances the poetics of the ruin without distorting its essence».
Closed to the public and abandoned since 1996, the former church of San Barbaziano has intensely experienced, through alternating historical events and changes of use, the centuries that have passed since its construction between 1608 and 1612, commissioned by the Order of the Gerolamini and designed by the architect Pietro Fiorini. The single-nave layout, with four pairs of side chapels and a transept, lent itself over time to being transformed, in the nineteenth century, into a barn and later into a military warehouse, and in the twentieth century, after a fire in 1922, into a mechanical workshop and, until its closure, into a garage.
For some months now, as a place of culture of the State under the care of the National Museums of Bologna – Regional Directorate of National Museums Emilia-Romagna, it is ready to fulfill a new function after a restoration, commissioned in 2019, which has preserved the historical memory of the building, enhancing its nature as an urban ruin, and restored legibility to the architecture without masking its history, enhancing the material consistency and maintaining the signs of a “project of time”.
«The intervention brought to light the essence of the building, combining the conservative restoration of the surfaces and external decorative elements with the introduction of innovative elements, concentrated in particular on the openings, physical witnesses of the passages of use that have followed one another over time». Contemporary elements such as the large glazed portal, which encourages passers-by to discover this new space in the city, the large windows with linear frames, the monolithic portal of the secondary entrance in burnished brass which, together with corten steel, becomes a “tool of contemporary contrast,” materials chosen because they recall the phenomenon of the action of time on matter and chromatically match the color of the sandstone and the brick of the wall cladding.
Photo credits: Alessandro Saletta, DSL studio
