Lanfranchi Palace, Pisa

Description

The visual material currently shown for Lanfranchi Palace, Pisa is presented here through a first website sequence derived from the conference Massimo et Lorenzo Carmassi — Restaurer & inventer, organized by the Société française des architectes and delivered by Massimo and Lorenzo Carmassi on 12 March 2026 at 247 rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris. In this initial online phase, the project is introduced through the conference’s narrative structure and through slide captions translated and adapted for the website; as this is a conference-derived sequence, individual image authorships and credits are not yet specified. Designed by Massimo Carmassi, with Gabriele Berti, and engineered by Brunetto Cartei, the restoration of Palazzo Lanfranchi was carried out between 1976 and 1980 for the Municipality of Pisa, with the aim of adapting the building as an exhibition centre. Facing the Arno in the historic Chinzica quarter, the palace appears as the result of a sixteenth-century transformation that unified a row of medieval tower houses behind a single Renaissance façade, while later internal reorganisation altered the earlier spatial order. A further major intervention in the early nineteenth century introduced, at the centre of the building, the large stairwell that became one of the most recognisable features of the palace. The restoration project does not seek to reconstruct an imagined original state. Its guiding idea is instead to accept, study and deliberately reveal the significant layers accumulated through time: blocked openings, traces of floors and beams, brick textures, decorative fragments, structural nodes and the many signs left by successive transformations. In this sense, the difficult building history of Palazzo Lanfranchi becomes not an obstacle to be erased, but the very thread that guides the project. The nineteenth-century stairwell becomes the visual and functional core of the intervention. Lit from above by a new large iron-and-glass skylight, it opens onto the surrounding rooms at every level and expands into the attic, made usable by lowering the top-floor slabs. Elsewhere, the removal of incongruous partitions restores larger medieval rooms and reactivates a more open system of paths, visual connections and spatial continuity. The few new insertions — iron superstructures painted beige, lightly framed glass partitions, terracotta floors and neutral white plaster — remain sober and clearly contemporary, allowing the new to enter into the old without violence. Outside, as on several internal walls, the plaster was removed so that the façade could display its different masonry textures, blocked openings and construction phases. The true protagonist of the project is therefore the building’s own constructed history, made legible again through restoration rather than concealed by it.