Waterfront Fesca-S.Girolamo

Fesca-S.Girolamo (BA), Italy

Waterfront Fesca-S.Girolamo
Fesca-S.Girolamo, Italy
2009

program: Preliminary design for the new waterfront and tourist facilities
total area: 79 950 m2
green areas: 55 400 m2
client: Comune di Bari
project: Alfonso Femia * with Ecosfera
hydraulic and environmental engineering: AI Engineering
urban design: Ecosfera spa
images: ©Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia
“We need to feel the sea as a visual, perceptual and pleasure-filled conquest. We need to mark the threshold separating artifice from nature with varying degrees of intensity, distinguishing what is solid from what is liquid, the never-changing from the variable. ” AF
Two lines of water where there is no water. Along the outskirts of a beach where there is no sand. Along the edges of a pathway where the space has no identity and is really absent. The sequence of closed sections of land accompany us, not without some difficulty, towards the layers of infrastructures running down to the sea. It is hard to find your bearings. There is nothing to be found. The struggle to feel and really grasp the sea, having reached this point, does not provide us with a dream-like vision of the sea. And yet coming to the sea should never lose this simultaneously dreamlike and very real feeling. Visually grasping hold of the horizon must not be turned into something bland out of indifference towards the location and its distinctive features. In order to do this we do not need new exercises in style and materials, linguistic exploits and/or striking spaces full of pointless, sentimental objects. We need to feel the sea as a visual, perceptual and pleasure-filled conquest. We need to mark the threshold separating artifice from nature with varying degrees of intensity, distinguishing what is solid from what is liquid, the never-changing from the variable. We need to grasp a new sense of interaction with the sea, at times solid and brutal (the speckle of rocks) at times light and almost floating (the visual diameters subtending the circles across the sea). Now everything turns into a discovery, always different according to the time of day, week and month. The front now has a horizontal base descending towards the sea like a horizontal strip carefully set across a variable topographic plane reminiscent of the keyboard of a piano in a sonata by Mozart.