Studentlife Chiaravalle 

February 2021

Student Life Chiaravalle was a projected designed in the Construction and Sustainability Design Course lead by Professor Matteo Celmenti and Professor Lorenzo Belli. The project brief called for the design of 10 student housing units on the site of the existing site of Circolo Arci F. Pessina. We could not remove the existing buildings on site, however, we could propose changes and renovations to the site. When assessing our site, we found that the isolation of Chiaravalle made the town itself a fascinating area to introduce student housing. As a town with a little more than a thousand permanent residents, a school has the opportunity to breathe new life into the area. We chose to keep our intervention within the confines of the existing site, placing 8 student units on the roof of an existing building and two within the building on the ground level. We rotated our modules to face south, optimizing the solar panel capacity and creating privacy from the first floor windows of the building across the small courtyard. We chose to loft our sleeping area in order to create the smallest footprint possible while maintaining an enjoyable space.

In addition to the student housing, we created a multi-purpose  pavilion that has sliding partitions to help define space and function depending on the communities needs. We also redesigned their park to keep the football pitch, provide food storage and farming space, and a bio bar. We also created spaces for community use, and added a mobile food experiment lab to be utilized by the school. We believe that this interaction between community and school creates a lasting bond between the permanent and temporary residents.

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Designed in collaboration with Nahida Aktar, Sadaf Aryaei, and Virignia Valentini. All images shown were generated by Mackenzie Bailey.