San Michele in Borgo Complex, Pisa

Description

San Michele in Borgo is one of our most emblematic works: the slow reconstruction of a bomb-damaged block in the medieval core of Pisa, wrapped around the apse and crypt entrance of the thirteenth-century church. For decades after the war the site remained an awkward void used as a car park, a gap in the urban fabric that exposed fragments of convent walls without offering any real public space. The project transforms this absence into a new internal piazza and a compact ensemble of housing and shops, conceived as an additional layer in the long stratification of the city rather than as a self-standing object. The design is guided from the outset by archaeological and structural constraints. Excavations revealed the long, narrow stone foundations of the demolished medieval building that once closed the square on the east; instead of erasing them with a deep modern basement, the project builds directly on these traces, as would have been done in the past. To the north and south, the surviving brick and stone walls are carefully restored and completed up to the height indicated by the scars on the party walls, with reconstructed vaults and new timber beams set into the original stone pockets. The result is a three-sided court whose perimeter is largely determined by existing masonry. Within this frame, the new construction adopts thick brick cavity walls, made of two outer skins in solid brick with reinforced-concrete infill, echoing the traditional muro a sacco while accommodating modern services. Towards the narrow streets the elevations appear as long, almost blind walls, interrupted only by deep vertical cuts and triple-height loggias that lead to the internal piazza and offer oblique views of the church apse. The recessed metal windows, pulled back from the facade to create small balcony pockets, underline the thickness of the wall and contribute to the sense of the building as a hollowed-out mass, closer to a contemporary ruin than to a thinly clad object. Programmatically, the ground floor is occupied by a continuous strip of commercial spaces, subdivided by slender iron-and-glass diaphragms that allow complete visual permeability from one side of the block to the other. Above, a series of modestly sized apartments with different layouts are arranged around the square, taking advantage of cross-ventilation, balconies and long diagonal views. Internal partitions in larch boards, together with the metal and glass elements, are clearly legible as lightweight, potentially reversible components set against the permanence of the masonry shell. The extremely long construction process – with work starting in 1985 after several project variants and continuing, in phases, into the early 2000s – is not an accident but part of the project’s character. The design is repeatedly refined during the works, as new information emerges from the fabric and as the team tests details at 1:20 and 1:1 on site. Even in its still partly unfinished state, especially along the southern front and the square, San Michele in Borgo demonstrates a precise attitude: to work with the constraints and traces of the historic city, using a limited palette of durable materials and a measured formal language so that the new construction can age with its surroundings and remain open to future, non-superficial transformations.