A huge structure hides a private courtyard, and the internal space seeks a dialogue with the surrounding city. Carlana Mezzalira Pentimalli's Bressanone Music School is a project that strikes a good balance between contrasting professions and transforms vacant spaces in the city into new landmarks.

The winners of the 2014 competition held by the city of Bressanone, Michel Carlana, Luca Mezzalira and Curzio Pentimalli designed the city’s new music school, which is first a new urban landmark, and solves the construction of other visual landmarks and layered signs around it . In the Upper Adige area, competition is an important way to ensure the quality of architecture and urban planning. Carlana Mezzalira Pentimalli is an architectural firm who believes in the advantages of this tool. They continue to experience this advantage, participating in and winning competitions that have changed the face of the city over the years. After winning the civic library competition, they learned from the observations of the city of Bressanone. By 2014, they were preparing to develop a plan for the city's conservatory, which was established in 1961 and is a landmark building in the entire region. Establishing the old and new relationship has become the starting point for cities and regions, and will not shrink from this comparison, where architectural idioms are seen as a tool to set off the local heritage. The site in question is an open space in the Priel area on the outskirts of the city, strategically located at the heart of the municipal redevelopment plan. The area borders the river to the east and has developed public facilities (swimming pools and large climbing halls); to the west is the intersection of the old Brennero highway between Austria and Italy, which is still an important gateway to the city; and the historic The entrance to the city center is to the south. As soon as the competition was announced, the architects were convinced that the project was not just a question of designing buildings, but also needed to work within the city to reaffirm the public mission of the school space. Therefore, the new building becomes a key part of the overall puzzle, because it is far from providing a simple "background", but is designed as a portal from the outside to the inside. The project is built around the contradictory concept of public squares and courtyards, serving as a gateway between the future city park and its underground parking lot to the north and Piazza Priel to the south. Levels 0 and -1 are ready for future connections. To the west of this new center is the volume containing the music school, with its large windows; the school and the courtyard form a wall as a single core. In order to create a new public place, Carlona Mezzalira and Pentimalli considered the city’s historical public buildings: walls and courtyards as passages are unique elements of the past and potential connections to the present. As a result, the site transformed from a vacant lot to a building, forming the background of the square and the small center of the town, an interface between stops, cultural landmarks and different parts of the city. The façade of the building adopts a seamless cladding and a piece of concrete, the structure of which becomes a real building. The building stands out because it does not have any type of cladding. It prefers concrete mixed with red porphyry inert materials and pigments and a shrub hammered surface to adapt the building to the colors and materials of the streets of Bressanone. The streets are paved with porphyry.

The conservatory rises from the wall to the top floor to reduce the perception of the building's volume from the outside. From different angles, the facade looks different: huge double-height windows overlook the square and the future park, and the rhythm of the small windows on the west side is iconic, where a new residential building with a different style was built. To the east, the "wall" reveals its true meaning: not just a boundary, but a series of vertical connections between the school and the public areas that it serves, such as future shops, storage spaces and children's playgrounds. "An unusual feature of the project is the'Music Garden', which is a beautifully decorated open-air room located inside the wall but outside the school building, removing the boundaries between inside and outside, and ambitiously trying to tame an urban space. Therefore," The name "Wunderkammer" (House of Miracles) refers to the era in history when private collections were open to the public, making "mirabilia" only visible to everyone before that. In the same spirit, we treat architecture as something everyone can do Enjoy the common interests," the architect explained. The exterior walls of the square are decorated with stylized patterns, inspired by the old wallpaper of the houses in the town, and the hand-beaten finishes can convey a strong sense of intimacy even in this open public place. From this unique internal space, the architects showed the organizational structure of the internal rooms and passages of the building through large windows, and constructed specific elements such as the white tower in Bressanone and scenes of daily life in the school. Therefore, the architects emphasized the public mission of the new music school. It is not a closed institutional building or the background of a square, but a space for dialogue with the surrounding city. This aspect was emphasized in the evening, and passersby were invited to enter and join the cultural program at the opening of the Conservatory.

Mara Corradi Architects: Carlana Mezzalira Pentimalli (Michel Carlana, Luca Mezzalira, Curzio Pentimalli) http://carlanamezzalirapentimalli.com/ Team: Michel Carlana, Luca Mezzalira, Curzio Pentimalli, Giada Cattelan, Asanio Oliviero, Alessand ZouneZ : Piazza Priel 7A, 39042 Bressanone, Italy Competition: December 2014, first prize Design phase: 2015-2017 Construction phase: 2018-2021 Completion: March 2021 Total plot area: 6.285 square meters Building area: 312 square meters Rice is average. Contractor: Unionbau General project direction: Carolina Mezzalira Pentimalli, 3M Engineering graphics and signs: Studio Mut structure in exposed reinforced concrete, with porphyry aggregates and pigments Shrub hammering of exposed concrete Natural wood covered with anodized aluminum The portal in the window marmorino has an inert polished mortar floor sowed natural oiled oak floors. Stairs and wooden cladding for special rooms. Custom metal doors and grilles. Photo by © Mar Cappelletti

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