Place: Piombino (LI), Località Baratti
Authors: Vittorio Giorgini
Chronology: 1960 | 1960; 2016 (restoration)
Itinerary: Italy goes on vacation
Use: Housing
The house designed by Vittorio Giorgini for the eccentric client Salvatore Saldarini, a well-known entrepreneur from Como. It represents a unique episode of formal experimentation in 20th century architecture. The house, immersed in the natural setting of a pine forest, overlooking the Gulf of Baratti, looks like the zoomorphic head of an animal about to emerge from the ground, which is why is also known as Il Dinosauro (The Dinosaur) or La Balena (The Whale).
The house’s structure consists of a double shell that suspends the dwelling from the ground. The arched conformation rests on the ground according to precise directions. Here, hooks fixed in the foundations are connected to the shell’s electro-welded mesh.
The house’s structure is the result of experimentation: made of cement and electro-welded mesh, it is supported by the principle of the isoelastic membrane, which allows the construction of large-sized roofs with the use of very small thicknesses. This daring composition proved to be so resistant during the testing phase that it managed to sustain a load double that of regulatory provisions. This technique had been used by Giorgini a few years earlier, in some prototypes for children’s playground equipment in the garden of the nearby Casa Esagono, which he also designed.
Recent restoration work on the house’s interior returned a fluid and dynamic environment, where the exposed concrete or white plaster contrast with the window frames’ dark wood.
An uninterrupted path leads from the entrance ramp to the suspended bridge, to the house and its roof, where a solarium is accessible through a spiral path.
Giorgini, a pupil of Leonardo Savioli and friend of architects and artists such as Isamu Noguchi and Gordon Matta-Clark, was fully included in the Florentine milieu and, since 1969, in the American cosmopolitan environment. He taught for a period at the “School of Architecture” of the Pratt Institute of New York. His works have been exhibited at the MoMA in New York, at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, and others acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris.