Andreussi House, Pisa

Description

Andreussi House in Pisa transformed a medieval tower of the most elementary local type into a dwelling based on a radically new internal organization. The surviving structure consisted of two strong almost parallel stone walls, thickened at their ends to form four piers, originally crowned by pointed arches that had disappeared over time. Between these piers, ancient projecting wooden balconies had long since been replaced by brick infill with rectangular windows, while the summit of the building had been completed with a belvedere capped by a pitched roof and ten arched openings. Because the floors and roof had collapsed after a long period of abandonment, the project introduced a completely autonomous internal system, independent from the exposed stone envelope. A free-standing volume containing a spiral stair, partly enclosed within a sheet-metal cylinder, and a lift established the vertical connections across five levels, one of them below ground, obtained by excavation down to the level of the foundation offsets. The stair rose into the belvedere, used as a study, and continued to a long pre-existing south-facing terrace carved within the thickness of the medieval wall. In several places the new floors were deliberately smaller than the full surface of the tower, generating multiple internal volumes and a strong sense of vertical permeability. The project did not seek a philological reconstruction of the lost interior fabric, but treated the ancient shell as a permanent masonry body within which a new domestic sequence was inserted. This attitude belonged to an early phase of the studio’s work, more oriented toward the autonomy of new architecture than toward the stricter conservative approach developed later. At the rear, the partially collapsed masonry superstructure between the two back piers was replaced on the lower three levels by a large transparent iron-and-glass wall opening onto the courtyard, bringing light deep into the house and establishing a luminous relation with the exterior. At the belvedere level this closure became a timber-and-glass wall, while the bedroom on the fourth level overlooked the internal void through a narrow terrace that also projected outward. The kitchen and the children’s rooms were accommodated in an annex inserted into the neighbouring building, completing a domestic organism in which the new inhabitable structure remained clearly distinguishable from the medieval enclosure.