"Pineland"

Famous for its natural beauty, Lignano’s Pine Forest represents one of the most distinctive locations of the city: a wild environment characterised by autochthonous vegetation typical of the Adriatic coast. Although today a large part of the Pinewood is protected, several plots are privately owned. The pressures of real estate development are not few and the risk of uncontrolled speculation is now stronger than ever. The ambitious aim of this competition is to achieve the incorporation of an eco-hotel complex immersed within the Pinewood landscape, while si­multaneously ensuring the enhancement and preservation of its natural surroundings. Besides, participants will take on the challenge of designing a new masterplan capable of integrating and re-establishing the connections between the Pinewood area and the rest of the urban fabric.

The project aims, by means of multiple grafts, to stitch up and improve the quality and usability of the public spaces that settle between the large pine forest and the sandy shoreline of Lignano Sabbiadoro. This area is the salient and spectacular arrival point of the Alpe Adria Cycle Route, which in its protrusion offers to the viewer a rather unique section of European landscape, stretching from the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea.

Starting from the hinterland, the project insinuates itself into the pine forest by means of a careful stitching of paths and trails with the intention of increasing the degree of porosity, permeability and inclusiveness of the nature oasis, offering new opportunities for contemplation of local flora and fauna.

The main path is the fil rouge of the complete intervention: it unfolds in the remnants of the pre-existences like a ribbon – among the trees and between the buildings – also enhancing the paths designed by Piccinato in the second half of the 20th century. The promenade separates from the solid ground of the Plaza through a change in elevation, opening unseen glances at the landscape to, finally, lead them to the horizon, where the path transforms into a pier of “heterogeneous objects”, at once useful and playful, offering a surprising floating space-potentially always ready to sail to the open sea.

The result is an iridescent architectural landscape, which rewires fragments of lived space with new fragments of perceived space, which contains, conceals or constitutes “pitfalls” carrying new dialectics between past and future, as well as poetic transformation of reality.

The focus of the project is the Commercial Plaza, within which are grafted some “arenas” in the quality-deficient interstices between the existing buildings: they are conceived as organic and sinuous forms that set the preliminary stage for other activities and functions within the open space, which is revealed as a mostly abandoned place to date. A wooded clearing, a small play-square, an outdoor arena/theater, all these are attempts to overwrite and give voice back to an otherwise mute spatiality, offering it a new urban characterization.

The eco-hotel, with its rooms and shared services, is conceived as a fragmented corpus, where each apartment generates new opportunities for immersion and relationship with the changing landscape of the pine forest, without at the same time losing the characters of communion and inclusiveness with the rest of the complex. The architectural structure of the eco-hotel – together with the apartment units’ one – is designed entirely in wood, a sustainable material, and so are the cladding materials of the elevations and ground surfaces, through which a high degree of water permeability has been maintained. This idea moves its steps in continuity with the generative principles of D’Olivo’s project for Lignano Pineta. The architecture is based on a low-density model, oriented toward the preservation of the native landscape, while respecting the good practices typical of sustainable design.

Progetti finalisti: