Caterina Dallara Foundation Headquarters

The early 20^th century saw several initiatives acknowledging and giving international credence to the poetics and cultural importance of Italian rural architecture. In the 1930s, Giuseppe Pagano was among the first to adopt a systematic approach, curating the exhibition and allied publication Architettura rurale italiana (1936) for Milan’s Triennale that included hundreds of photographs of rural buildings. A few decades later, Bruno Zevi’s paper Architectura in nuce (1960) recalled how the study of so-called lesser, or less acclaimed, architecture by anonymous authors had brought to light rural houses, shepherds’ huts, barns, and mountain shelters of true artistic value. This led to some of these buildings achieving international recognition when they crossed the Atlantic to become part of the exhibition Architecture Without Architects curated by Bernard Rudofsky for New York’s MoMA. Today, “lesser” architecture is once again receiving renewed interest, not only in the sense of rediscovering Italy’s lesser-known building traditions but also looking at how they are transformed and adapted for new use. A pointed example is the new headquarters of the Caterina Dallara Foundation in Varano de’ Melegari (Parma province), designed by Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia. The project started with research into local rural buildings that revealed the existence of an old disused barn and hayloft – a typical feature of Emilia’s agricultural landscape – along the provincial road running through the village and alongside Dallara Automobili, the client’s firm. The old barn now hosts the new offices thanks to an adaptive reuse project that fully respects the original site and volume.

The project’s ability to embody the Foundation’s identity and effectively represent its underlying principles is especially apparent in the architectural section. It is this view...

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