Competition Reuse the Tower - Torre Rinalda. 2023
Melina Parpal - Fiama Serra
Heritage/Landscape/Landmark/Tourism/Citizenship
With its textures, its colors, its essence, the Torre Rinalda remains like a ruin to which is added a structure of screens and paths that represent its original function: to look, to observe, spot, but also warn, alert. On the idea of bringing the contemporary to the ruins: although the Towers had the sighting as their main function, today they coexist with a wide variety of activities. It is worth thinking about Italy today; tourism throughout the country; especially in these coastal towns in which the same system of towers is repeated along the sea coast. These activities transform the territory and, in relation to leisure and strolling it is proposed to think of the Towers as a public space device capable of contain history and contemporaneity; one that can stay or disappear; that changes during the moments of the day.
Throughout the day, reading places in the shade of the patio; exhibitions on the Ground Floor and Level 1; viewpoints for sighting of flora and fauna are provided. During the night, all of them have place but also it is possible to project films colors and shows claiming the Tower as a symbol of light and warning that something is happening there.
Thinking of the Tower at a territorial scale of coastal cities, Torre Rinalda, as an exploratory case of study is thought to generate a strategy and a system to be also replicated in different towers. It is proposed as a contemporary landmark that is part of a coastal system of paths along the beach that also connects the city and the towers with each other. It can be done on foot, by bike, for tourists but also for citizens and sports. This would allow us to think of a walk where there is movement and capable of generating a continuous coastal walk.
The idea of having control of the landscape through a viewing point seems a bit absolute. In the case of this project, relating this concept to the heritage and the history of towers, it refers to its basic function, which was to spot and warn of a dangerous situation or some arrival on the coast. The reinterpretation arises from transforming this conscious sighting into contemplating the landscape and the territory.
As a contemporary landmark, the Tower becomes an attractor for citizens and tourists, a catalyst for artistic proposals. Both outside and inside and in its different phases you can appreciate the art, the Tower itself, the landscape. At the same time, and during the night, a system of screens materialized with fabric would represent cinematic works, photography and other projections invoking the main essence of the tower in its beginnings: telling something that is happening in the site through the light.
