Architectural project: Studio Milani Siena
Landscape project: Arscape
Intro
A few kilometers from Siena, in the Chianti Classico wine-growing area, the Pensieri di Cavatina estate was founded only a few years ago. Its name combines the evocative toponym that characterizes the property (called Pensieri di Sotto and Pensieri di Sopra) with that particular type of musical aria, the cavatina, through which each performer enters and presents themselves in Italian opera.
The fascination of a place with unexpressed potential — where the humid landscape of the stream in the valley, with majestic poplars along the banks mixed with hazel trees and blackberries, merges with the rustling of vineyards and olive groves along the slopes and with the whisper of water flowing through thin spouts against local stone backdrops — completely captivated the owner of Polish origin.
His aspiration: to create a place where nature and human work could flow into one another, generating a holistic project in which the whole is, as is known, greater than its parts.
Holism (from the Greek holos, meaning “the whole”) is a philosophical position based on the idea that the properties of a system cannot be explained exclusively through its components. The term, together with the adjective “holistic,” was coined in the 1920s by Jan Smuts (1870–1950), a South African politician, intellectual and philosopher, author of Holism and Evolution (1926).
This ambitious dream, entrusted to a team of architects and landscape designers with twenty years of experience in the territory and in contemporary architecture, has produced a productive landscape even more connected to the everyday life of the local community and certainly capable of generating new and stimulating cultural values.
The narrow country road that crosses Pensieri di Cavatina — long a favored route for open-air walks by the inhabitants of nearby Pianella and a destination for occasional hikers — now tells a new story and accompanies the anonymous constructions of the existing hamlet with a natural scenography of old and new scents of the earth.
The project, currently nearing completion, already expresses this desire to create an immersive experience in which sounds, colors, scents, flavors and unexpected tactile consistencies chase and flow into one another.
The dominant chord is undoubtedly water, with its material and conceptual implications. Its presence — at times silent and invisible — accompanies, emphasizes, or shapes the slopes of vineyards and olive groves. By listening to and observing its essence, so delicate yet powerful in certain seasons, a functional as well as landscape-based approach was adopted, attentive also to the hydraulic implications that derive from it.
Along this guiding thread, a way of traversing the property was designed through an experiential path capable of connecting the various productive areas with those intended for hospitality or more private spheres.
The two gardens of Pensieri di Sotto and Pensieri di Sopra will in fact be connected, through thematic paths along the wetland area and the cultivated fields of lavender, olive trees and vineyards, to a biodynamic vegetable garden, a greenhouse of citrus fruits and edible flowers for the small restaurant, a tasting area and chamber music space in the shade of the poplars along the bend of the small stream in the valley, and an outdoor meditation and yoga space adjacent to a small coppice woodland.
The entire intervention thus unfolds around a palette of materials linked both to local building traditions and to the colors and textures of the surrounding territory, generating a project of accompaniment and listening to the existing landscape.
Alongside tactile and chromatic effects, an interaction has been recreated with more ethereal and changeable characteristics of the new landscape, such as smells, the movement of leaf colors in the wind, the sound of nature in the morning, or the apparent silence of spring sunsets.
Another objective of the project is the implementation of the existing flora and fauna system, accompanying rather than altering natural environments through structural and impactful interventions, and adopting a production policy that would allow the estate to achieve organic certification.
The garden of Pensieri di Sopra, inaugurated last summer, exemplifies every aspect of the evolving overall project.
A precise reading of the volumetric relationships between the existing buildings and the solids and voids resulting from the cumulative way in which additions and small temporary sheds had been aggregated around them — as well as the selection of tree species to be staged within the new park so they could tell their story — made it possible to work through a spatial, material and chromatic “patchwork” of great impact and suggestion.
The access road to Pensieri di Sopra, now transformed into the hospitality and dining area of the farm, flows within an elegant architectural ensemble, with patinas and colors harmonized with the local stone, used to reconstruct retaining walls as well as carved seating along changes in level.
Along this promenade, which unfolds like a longitudinal river worked in tones of purple and green, expanses of soft, undulating grasses stretch to the north and south, punctuated by striking purple echinaceas. The views toward the valley and toward the opposite slope in the direction of nearby Vitignano act like bends where the flow slows down, creating intimate chiaroscuro episodes differentiated in the design and color of climbing plants.
Light and breeze, which during the first visits to the property appeared like unattainable mirages overwhelmed by humidity, suffocating shadows and decay, are now protagonists of surprising changes of scenery in which vegetation follows itself through lush blooms, into which one can immerse from spring to the first whispers of winter.
Project Data
Typology: Design and construction supervision
Location: Pianella, 2019
Status: Completed
Photos: @delriobani; Arscape
Promoter
Private
Category
Landscape, Architecture, Design