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Rifredi Institute and Museum of Italian Design

Part 2 Project 2003
Jamie Le Gallez
 Kingston University Kingston | UK
The project allows the public to recognize Italian design and innovation as key elements of the cultural and economic fabric of their lives. The diverse nature of public spaces, Italian Rationalist Urban Design and the importance of discrete detailing in Italian furniture and clothing design informed my approach. The scheme plays with the relationships between linings and exterior spaces, and the intermingling of the surfaces of floors and walls, windows, loggias and courtyards, where intimate and secret spaces can be transformed through use and events. It creates an architecture grounded within its context and able to engage with its neighbours.


Jamie came to Kingston with a solid part1 training in the orthodox modernist fashion, and he has developed further into a thoughtful and serious designer. He embodies the RIBA's description of architects as, 'essentially practical thinkers'. In his diploma project he proposed a design institute and museum for the Rifredi district of Florence. He reasoned that design is part of Italian daily life and so the distinctions between high and popular culture are less severe than in other countries. This straightforward premise was pursued with quiet confidence and calm assurance. The resulting design is indebted to the aspects of Renaissance architecture which he found inspiring, spatial porosity, extended thresholds, walls which became spaces in themselves and a general openness and massiveness that has been carefully studied and respected. He is a cheery and also pretty determined character, and his building design exhibits some of the twin and hard-to -capture contradictions, that mark mature work. Material weight and weightlessness, light qualities which become volumetric and almost-solid, public access to intimate and secret places, spaces with emphatic characters which can nonetheless be transformed through use and events. A sophisticated designer, set to surprise us.
2003
Project description and Images of site model.
Piazza level site plan and images of influences within Italy.
Ground floor site plan with images of courtyards and loggia spaces.
Piazza level museum plan
First floor plan of public exhibition spaces.
third floor plan of exhibition space, teaching facilities and second courtyard. showing the continuation of stone flooring from piazza level.
Fourth floor plan of library and third internal courtyard space.
Image of main entrance space and courtyard with pool.
Images of main exhibition space that can be transformed through use and events.
Internal view of library and reading carrels.
Section through main courtyard and piazza space.
Secion through second courtyard and exhibition spaces.
Section through exhibition and library spaces of museum and through institute.
Rendered section through main courtyard showing the materiality of spaces and how the buildings structure and spaces are revealed through this courtyard.
Detailed section through exhibition space showing the relationship between the concrete structure and stone cladding in relation to the openings.
Detailed section and part east elevation showing the use of the stone cladding.
External detail of stone cladding and light qaulities within an exhibition space.
Detail of Library carrel and roof structure.
View of scheme looking East through public piazza
View of scheme looking West from public park
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