#Industry News
Enchanting porcelain stoneware flooring for the new lower secondary school in Puos d’Alpago
The 2024 project for the new lower secondary school in Puos d’Alpago, in the province of Belluno (Italy), designed by the architect Gianluca Facchinelli, took first prize in the 13th edition of the Grand Prix architecture contest
The 2024 project for the new lower secondary school in Puos d’Alpago, in the province of Belluno (Italy), designed by the architect Gianluca Facchinelli, took first prize in the 13th edition of the Grand Prix architecture contest, in the shopping and office centres, public and service buildings category, with the following motivation: “The regular, monolithic figure of the horizontal building, blending into the surrounding landscape with the mountains behind it and characterised by the compact brick colour of the external building envelope, strikes an effective, pleasing contrast with the terrazzo seminato flooring inside. Set into the light background of the porcelain stoneware tiles are chips in various grey tones and earthy shades, creating an effective irregular pattern that complements the rigour of the overall architecture.”
The project originated from an AWN design contest organised in 2018 by the Municipality of Alpago with the aim of countering population decline by investing in education.
The school is developed around the theme of a “covered square” inspired by an almost primitive idea of a settlement. It is configured as a volume suspended on four cores that form a sheltered space embodying a smooth transition between the exterior and the interior, able to act as a community centre outside of school hours.
The coloured concrete cores that embrace the utility areas mark off the central agorà, arranged around which are the workshop areas, enlivened by the wooden volumes of the reading room and the reception area.
The axis planted with trees featured in the master plan runs through the building, bringing the trees inside through perimeter courtyards that allow the light to flow into the collective areas. The classrooms alternate with workshops, arranged around the central square, engaging constantly with it thanks to the sliding walls and windows. The visual permeability between the spaces is the hallmark of the project, creating a sort of interior landscape.
The project explores the way in which shape, structure and material coincide, through a fair-faced concrete shell created using an advanced prefabrication technology, which does not require any additional finishing layers, and contains both the insulation for the building and the housing for its utility systems.
Both the indoor flooring and some of the walls were tiled using the terrazzo-inspired Le Ville collection, in the colour Pisani and in the 60x120 cm size; a total of 1,700 square metres of tiles were used.
Le Ville brings a modern slant to Venetian terrazzo, a flooring material with centuries of history and among the most original, renowned creations in the Italian craftsmanship tradition. Unevenly sized marble chips merge with geometric designs on the tiles, forming a richly detailed, sophisticated pattern of sublime quality.
Fragments of different sizes combine beautifully on these tiles, with random repetitions and continuous surfaces creating beautifully rich geometric patterns that attract the light, shaping a splendid chiaroscuro effect with an original, timeless beauty. Squared, rectified, with zero warpage and available in large formats, the porcelain stoneware tiles in the Le Ville collection can be used to create a seamless look with minimal joints, ideal for tiling large surfaces.
The collection is a tribute to beauty, in which the vintage, artisan look of the grits teams with the impressive technical performance of porcelain stoneware, for maximum creative freedom. Traditional yet contemporary, with all the elegance of days gone by.
Ph: Gustav Willet
