Ducal Palace, Guastalla

Description

The visual material currently shown for Ducal Palace, Guastalla is presented here in a temporary form. It has been assembled by Carmassi Studio di Architettura from its archive and derives from the lecture delivered by Lorenzo Carmassi on 15 March 2025 at the conference “Il valore e la vocazione d’uso del patrimonio architettonico” (“The Value and Adaptive Reuse Potential of Architectural Heritage”), held at the Sala Veneziana di Castel San Zeno, Montagnana (PD), within the programme promoted by Fondazione Sandro Lucco, Comune di Montagnana – Assessorato alla Cultura, and Sezione di Montagnana. The selection includes photographs, drawings and graphic documents of different origin, whose individual authorships and credits are not yet specified in this provisional online version. A dedicated project presentation prepared specifically for the website, with complete captions, references and image attributions, will follow in a later phase. Ducal Palace, Guastalla is one of the most important restoration projects in the Carmassi corpus. Developed between 2001 and 2008 for the vast Palazzo Ducale of the Gonzaga in the historic centre of Guastalla, it addresses a building whose sixteenth-century origin had been profoundly altered by centuries of additions, damage, adaptive reuse and decline. The project does not attempt to simplify this condition into a purified image. On the contrary, it recognises the palace as a complex historical organism whose true value lies in the coexistence of archaeological traces, structural adjustments, decorative layers, hidden openings, later floors, improvised partitions and fragile survivals accumulated over time. The intervention is founded on a rigorous ethic of conservation. Decorated surfaces concealed beneath later whitewashes are revealed through stratigraphic tests, cleaned and consolidated; ancient floors in cotto, terrazzo, wood and other materials are preserved wherever possible and only dismantled when structurally unavoidable; historic timber elements, doors and windows are restored according to a conservative logic; and the façades are treated as layered material presences rather than reduced to a falsely homogeneous finish. A sequence of precise operations — reopening blocked openings, demolishing precarious accretions and suspended ceilings, removing superimposed pavements and recovering hidden decorative apparatuses — restores legibility, light and dimensional depth to the palace. At the same time, the building is not frozen. New elements required for safety, accessibility and public use are inserted with extreme care: lifts, reconfigured stairs, sanitary facilities, service areas and other technical devices are placed in compromised or secondary parts of the complex so that they do not violate the architectural character of the historic rooms. These contemporary additions remain clearly modern, but are proportioned and located in a way that supports rather than disrupts the perception of the original organism. A central theme of the project is the recovery of the internal court and its perimeter loggia. The ground-floor portico around the court is reopened, while the early twentieth-century iron-and-glass roof and the wooden gallery are restored. In this way the court is transformed into a covered civic interior: a public square inside the palace, crossed from the main piazza towards the rear garden and surrounded by large vaulted and decorated rooms. The ground floor is conceived for public, commercial and service-related activities; the upper levels accommodate museum, exhibition, library and office functions according to the different qualities of the spaces. The project is also organised in phases, so that the most significant central portions of the palace can regain autonomous use without compromising future lots of restoration. Especially significant is the approach taken in spaces where the project seeks not stylistic reconstruction but critical spatial clarification. In the ducal chapel, for example, the aim is not to reconstruct mimetically the lost decorative apparatus, but to recreate the original volume so that visitors can understand the former spatial relation between that room and the rest of the palace, while still leaving visible the violence of previous destruction. The project thus presents restoration as an act of revelation, subtraction and measured reintegration: not the production of a false unity, but the reactivation of a monumental organism through conservation, legibility and renewed civic use.