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Palazzo Posidonia: Public Bathing, Commerce and Industry

Part 1 Project 2021
Ian Davide Bugarin
London Metropolitan University | UK
‘Palazzo Posidonia’ imagines the development of a manufacturing industry using ‘posidonia’, a Mediterranean seagrass or Neptune grass, named after Poseidon. The project professes a sustainable industry aimed at forging connections between commerce and habitation, land and sea, local people and new migrants. It imagines a closed loop system producing composite building products, which take a journey from the depths of the Tyrrhenian Sea to the sun-bleached brise soleil of the ‘Palazzo Posidonia’.

Empathy with social, political and economic concerns resulted from my stay and involvement with NGOs and locals wishing to re-imagining the town's future.

The proposed factory, inhabits an armature of the Palazzo del Giudice and its historic garden. It speaks as much about the public celebration and social engagement of the process, as it does about its opulent renaissance heritage. Its setting is part of an Italian suburban commuter belt along the coast, connecting Naples to Sicily and typically negotiates concrete infrastructures of road and rail.

The project creates a new corridor, actively connecting the Palazzo del Giudice, once used as a mill and stronghold for wheat, to land and sea. Its mill towers, are now echoed by the wind towers for grinding and drying the seagrass and the vast chambers of steam and baths used in the process of fusing and compacting the seagrass now recall the Palazzo’s grand classical hall.

Ian Davide Bugarin

Tutor(s)
Sandra Denicke-Polcher
Jane Mcallister
2021
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