This thesis project looks into a building located in Cupra Marittima, a municipality in the province of Ascoli Piceno in the Marche region. For some years this building has been a farmers’ Cooperative.
This farmers’ association has been very crucial and important in the history of the local and Italian agriculture and economy, as it helped achieving the increase and improvement of the agricultural production and gave its social and cultural contributions through the provision of goods and services useful both for the agricultural activity and the trade of their productions.
The basic idea of this project is to revitalize a no longer used building , which, though for a short period, belonged to the history of the farmers’ Cooperative of Cupra Marittima.Therefore, the goal of the project is to restore the old functions of the Cooperative, in a modern and more dynamic version, seeking to integrate those functions with new ones in order to attract both visitors and experts.
From this perspective a new functional programme raises which, besides aiming at creating a close relation with the river, has its main representative in the food. An agricultural museum, a cookery school, a local quality market, an “agri-child”, cultivation areas, a conference hall and a cafeteria will come to life. The building will be surrounded by pedestrian-cycling paths.
The project focuses on the recycling of the ordinary heritage through formal strategies able to activate new life cycles in the unexploited buildings and at the same time able to re-establish a new balance between artifice and nature. By rediscovering the architectural heritage of the agricultural landscape of the Marche region, the project uses the field structures to reorganize the internal and external space of the analyzed building, which has been transformed in a new polarity in the agri-food sector.
