The project curated by Open Project interprets the new needs of sociality among university students.
If you are from Bologna you have an attachment to your beautiful city that is different from what one encounters in Italians who are fond of the place where they were born; you talk about it with the pride of someone who knows that living is a mess where work meets, lots and lots to do without too many questions about how and why, and pleasure, which should possibly be a little more. You have a playful attitude, facilitated by its streets and arcades, among the sweetest and most continuous ever lined up; from the historic center, which counts the centuries between the stones of the churches, the vaults of the noble palaces and the towers that bow to the passage, intact and constantly updated; there is a lot of politics, red and resistant, and there is nature, soft, with the hills around where to go to party after the rallies or to get some fresh air in the summer. And then there is the university, the first in the world by foundation, which among the many implications has in itself that of bringing a constant generational turnover and an influx of young people who is partly an elixir for the spirit and partly an urban and urban theme in progress.
The new Laude Living Bologna student residence managed by the group Beyoo which is now a recognized force in thehousing for freshmen and seniorssigned by Open Project and created starting from a concept developed together with the British TP Bennett, interprets it in perspective and, while on the one hand it focuses on the housing needs of the twenties, on the other it interprets those social and social components that are the backbone of relationships today and possibly tomorrow. The quarter chosen is that of Bologna, an area just adjacent to the center and close to the railway station; the former working-class area, which in the 19th century, before the bombings suffered during the Second World War, was full of neo-Renaissance buildings and which, from the 1950s to today, has been somewhat depersonalized to make room for architectures that are less in harmony with each other and more functional to the needs of the economic boom.
The building, which redevelops a pre-existing area and adds new modules, rises sixteen floors above ground and has one underground. From the lower trapezoidal part which forms the basis of the residence and opens onto a courtyard which is the heart of the student residence, rises a fifteen-story tower containing both private accommodation and common areas. Its facade is marked by an alternation of pure lines given by the windowed parts that follow one another with the blind ones and harmonizes with the surrounding environment, while detaching it in height, thanks to the choice of a chromatic palette of warm neutral tones and slightly earthy accents . If Laude Living clearly wants to establish an almost loving relationship with the panorama of roofs, bricks, streets and alleys on one side and the countryside on the other, which it overlooks and from which it wants to be admired, in the same way it defines a standard in living together. Inside there are private apartments, completely autonomous, in which to carve out one’s own space, but also many and different possibilities for sharing: a library and a study area, the lounge, the cafeteria, a gym, the laundries, the area for receiving mail and a green space – the racks for the gentle mobility of bicycles, the preferred means of transport by the inhabitants of the Rossa, are inevitable.
“This project goes beyond the preconceived idea of a dormitory space, it is on the contrary a place for sharing, for collaborative study, but also a place that favors leisure and creativity. These aspects are central to the training process of girls and boys, just as it is crucial to learn to create relationships with others, to be able to share one’s vision of the future, because it is precisely from confrontation that we form our identity”, says Maurizio Piolanti , president of the Open Project. He is echoed by shareholder Francesco Conserva, who underlines how “the student housing becomes an attractor of talents and a promoter of creative and entrepreneurial ferment, a turning point in cultural promotion and territorial development tout court, an element that is fundamental not only because it trains the professionals of tomorrow but also because it defines today’s citizens”.
A further link between these ideals and everyday life is interior design, which here plays a leading role. In stark contrast to the polite rigor of the exterior, the different parts of this large container light up now with pop colors in yellow, blue, pink and green color blocks, now with large graphic lettering in the form of murals, to amalgamate with a style industrial curated by the historian Cesare Roversi and revisited in a contemporary key, softer and also the latter with a few more chromatic notes, to accommodate the ethnic diversity that has always, and still, merged in the learned Bologna.