L'Ulivo Pool in Southern Italy

L'Ulivo pool
Location: Tarquinia, Tyrol, northern Italy

Design: Laboratorio di Architettura e Design

This work concerned the design of the garden, the pool and of the dome of an existing villa. The particularity of the space was the presence of olive trees, while the architecture of the villa, in its simplicity, had a recess in the facade, placed at the exit to the garden: these two elements were used as a starting point in the design.

L'Ulivo pool

Two ideal axes divide the site: the first hits the olive tree and is parallel to the villa, the second is placed in the center of the recess and is transverse to the building. A wooden square platform is placed at the intersection of these axes.

Arriving at the platform along the transverse axis, one realizes that the pool system is a longitudinal concrete slab with geometric holes to accommodate the other elements that make it up: the pool itself. and the flower bed containing the olive tree.

These two holes are filled with two different fluids: water and bark. The northern closure of the pool is a further wooden platform which is interrupted and rises upwards to become a wall containing the showers. This element is the equivalent of the olive tree and marks as a visual boundary, a boundary of space before the edge of the plot.

According to Christian Norberg-Schulz, the existential purpose of Architecture is to transform a site into a place, which is to discover the meanings that potentially exist in the given environment: the ambition of this work is to rationalize space by revealing a class, the which was merely hidden but nevertheless in the place.

L'Ulivo Pool – Building Information
Type: Swimming pool
Location: Pian Di Spille (VT), Italy
Design: 2015
Completed: 2016
Client: Private
Designer: Matteo Bianchi