MARINA DI PORTISCO, SARDINIA, ITALY (2015)
This large project in Sardinia will build a five star tourist settlement in an area where preserving the countryside and reforestation is recognized by the client to be of the outmost importance. Deliberately not built on the shore, but 300 meters. The project aims to maintain and increase the present vegetation between the sea and this complex of buildings. A very key aspect of this project is to create working places for the island’s population. That is a capital consideration in the present situation of widespread unemployment, especially among the young. All the architectural components of this settlement will return all the land and planting that the footprint of more conventional buildings than these ones would have covered.
Its component parts are:
1. A 150 room hotel
2. A wellness center
3. Nine high level residential villas
4. An interdenominational compound made up of three chapels)
5. A yachting port and marina
6. New access roads integrated into the landscape, and,
7. A program of replanting to recreate the once existing Mediterranean vegetation.
All construction materials have been selected for their biocompatible qualities. The project endeavors to use local artisanal skills as well as the most bio efficient water and electricity equipments, with special attention to recycling solid matter as well as to the re-utilization of the “gray waters.”
1. Hotel: this eco-sustainable project will use earth, planting, and water as its primordial elements. The hotel’s rooms will follow the site’s levels re-composing this site’s orography by means of stepped section volumes. All the rooms arranged in such stepped sections will have its roofs covered with planting and, by grace of this device, all rooms will face a roof garden
2. Wellness Center: it will be a high-level component of the hotel’s attractions, volumetrically independent from the hotel but very accessible from it
3. Villas: aimed at a well-heeled clientele
4. Interdenominational compound composed of three chapels: Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Muslim
5. The yacht port or marina, capable of hosting yachts of a size up to 90 meters, will provide 589 berths protected from a rough sea by three piers. In addition to covered car parking facilities the marina will provide all type of services (restaurants, mechanical workshops, marine related shops, as well as offices for the port administrators)
6. The new roads, paved with a small sized product derived from trees’ bark, and providing access to these facilities, are designed to be well integrated into the landscape
7. A committed re-forestation and planting program using local vegetation and covering all the terrain within the compound’s boundaries.
Associate Architects: P. Devescovi & C. lo Verde
