Management Center of the Sicily Region

The Master Plan project between urbanity and landscape

The project expresses the unique identity of the Sicilian land rich in contamination, open to the world, and turned towards the future, to return to be a model to look at. The identity of the project is based on the dual concept of Urbanity and Landscape, where nature and Sicilian culture blend, in a strong and closely interconnected bond, as in a few other places in the world.
That Nature, luxuriant and arid at the same time, living in the majestic Sicilian landscape, fluid in the alternation of horizontality and verticality, and that belongs to and continuously feeds the millenary and stratified cultural identity of the Sicilian people, it can be found as crystallized in two strongly connotative elements of the landscape: the karst rock carved and eroded by the wind, which gave rise to scenic valleys scattered in the territory, and the fragile and at the time powerful leaf of dried prickly pear, another typical element of the Sicilian landscape. The grain of this leaf, so articulated and complex in collecting water and transmitting it capillary, is a metaphor for the vital flow that resists difficulties and reveals the flow of things, and energy.
Our project identifies in the karst landscape excavated the richness of space and landscape that the project organizes in its public part and then verticalizes in the volumes of the offices; and then in the complexity and lightness of the internal vein of the fig leaf, that plot capable of expressing the richness of the Sicilian landscape and culture understood as a plot, relationship, exchange. This “Plot” comes to life in the project in the reticular skin of the organic tower that embraces the stereometric volumes of the vertical tower, where the relationship between the towers lives the metaphor of the relationship between nature and artifice.