Santa Maria della Scala Hospital, Siena

Description

Designed by Massimo Carmassi and Gabriella Carmassi, the project for Santa Maria della Scala in Siena was conceived in 1992 as an invited competition proposal for the restoration and reuse of one of the most complex monumental hospital fabrics in Italy. The scheme defines restoration first and foremost as conservation: the safeguarding of the integrity and authenticity of the ancient building’s spaces and materials. For this reason, the project is founded on an architectural survey understood as a progressive act of knowledge, to be carried out in parallel with the opening of the chantier and supported by a vast photographic campaign and by the patient completion of drawings for every level, including floors, vaults, timber structures and decorative traces. Once this knowledge is acquired, the proposal reorganises the complex through a new reading of its spatial and distributive system. At the lower level, the internal street running longitudinally from east to west becomes the principal interpretative axis, crossing vaulted spaces of remarkable architectural character and independent rooms embedded within the larger fabric. Here the intervention works by subtraction, removing recent infill and secondary closures in order to restore horizontal and vertical transparency and to re-establish the central cloister as a key node of communication with the upper levels. Above Piazza del Duomo level, the main floor is restructured into a sequence of autonomous yet connected cultural and museum compartments, including the House of the Wet Nurses, the Rector’s House, the museums in the San Pio and San Leopoldo wards, the Passeggio and Pellegrinaio for temporary exhibitions, the southern areas around the cloister for the Museo dell’Arte Senese, the women’s hospital for the archaeological museum and university department, and the church with its sacristy. Throughout the complex, the project constantly relates horizontal reading to the superimposed volumes above, identifying coherent vertical groupings and inserting new stairs, glazed loggias and terraces only at weak or incoherent points in the fabric. The proposal culminates in the liberation of the south elevation, where post-war buildings and later accretions are removed so that the vast brick front can recover both its outward views and its landscape significance. The exposed stratification of the masonry becomes, in itself, the most eloquent image of the project’s method: restoration not as external invention, but as the patient extraction and clarification of what the ancient building already contains.