Carlo Ratti Associati has unveiled design details for its latest hospitality sector collaboration with Italo Rota located at the Monferrato UNESCO World Heritage site in Italy.

The studio’s new Roccia project reimagines a hilltop former monastery site in Piedmont into a new residential complex. The project relies on LIDAR scans to enable a new digitally-fabricated timber skin to be inserted amongst the 400-year-old brick ruins. CRA says this element of their design strategy “suggests a new approach for renovating historical buildings" while resolving a “harmony” between the natural and artificial.

The team describes: "Roccia – the Italian word for “rock” – is a hilltop monastery-turned-farmhouse in the heart of the Piedmontese countryside. The site has been in decay since a fire broke out in the early 20th century. Decades of neglect have further deteriorated the bricks and invited moss, ivy and saplings to set in. Its current conditions evoke the vision of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the 18th-century artist who saw the ruins of Rome as the starting point for the city of the future. The artificial world, reconquered by nature."

Ratti adds: “I have always been inspired by John Ruskin, and his idea that the decay of buildings should not be reversed. Like him, I admire the ‘deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity."

The project is the brainchild of CRA Make, an offshoot of the studio that is heavily engaged in materials research, construction, and prototyping. 

The Make team had previously driven work on the studio’s recent The Coffee Landscape and Wood You Believe? projects. Once completed, Roccia will join CRA's previous collaboration with Rota on the  AGO Modena project, another conversion disused historic underpinned by digital tools and completed at the end of 2018.

“Through a research process implemented with cloud scanning technologies, we developed a framework that aligns with the specific form of the house and the surrounding landscape,” CRA Make’s chief technology officer Mykola Murashko added finally. “This will become the backbone of Maestro, a company under the CRA group focusing on digital fabrication at every scale from buildings to neighborhoods.”

CRA says the project’s completion will follow sometime in 2024.