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Rustico

Federica Biondi, Simone Subissati Architects

A natural score: the life and spaces of the "Border Crossing House" in the hills near Ancona, in Italy.


Short film made by director Federica Biondi, “Rustico” is a visual storytelling of Border Crossing House by Simone Subissati Architects, a residential dwelling driven by a conceptual perspective and by the search for a sense of openness.

Border Crossing House, the private residence designed by Simone Subissati Architects and built in Polverigi, Ancona, is located on the ridge of a hill, between the city and the countryside, in a direct and open relationship with the natural environment that hosts it. Border Crossing House aims to redefine the categories of comfort and luxury according to a renewed attention to environmental issues. Right from the title, it is evident how the minimal and even "rustic" character of the building - which does not mean it is vernacular, but rather essential - responds to what luxury means today in architecture.

Taking place during a day of harvest, "Rustico" is a refined and poetic story told through images. The short film is an opportunity to explore and decline some of the themes that have guided the project by Subissati: "Love for nature and the land to which we belong, the space ( in the sense of architecture) that man builds for himself and that favors this profound and structural need and, finally, the absence as an inexorable constitutive factor in our life.”

Guided by the photography of Michele Coppari and lulled by the music by Giardini di Mirò, we wander inside and around Border Crossing House. The architecture is intendend to be a space that welcomes life, that finds its raison d’être in the mutual relationship with the surrounding environment. The regionalist heritage of "Rustico" does not imply a provincial attitude, but it is rather related to the capability of staying in contact with nature. "Rustico" is an ode to the life unrolling in the landscape framed by the windows of the house.

Explaining the reasons behind her direction, Federica Biondi says "Our origins are not only the ones within our family, but also the ones we build with the house we feel at home in (rather than the one where you were born), with the place in which we feel in connection with the universe, Nature. A place where we can be pure once again". So we understand how she wanted Pietro Conversano, who plays the dweller of the house, to be not an abstract character, but rather a person with needs and desires. We see him bathing in water, chasing the sunlight, revealing the spaces of the house designed by Simone Subissati from room to room, from morning ‘till night.

The director's gaze accompanies us from outside to inside the house, to discover the shapes and spaces designed by the architect, from the living room, to the winter garden, to the water pool outside, from day to night, to a new dawn. As Subissati tells us, "the space acts as a composition, a balance, a score, between closed and open. Open to the outside to let in. Closed to protect."

(Story by Sara Marzullo, The Architecture Player)

Credits

Mentioned project: Casa di Confine (2019)
Project location: Polverigi, Ancona, Italy
Production: Simone Subissati Architects
Actor: Pietro Conversano
Editing and color grading: Alessandro Tarabelli, Diego Morresi
Cinematography: Michele Coppari
Music: Giardini di Mirò with Daniel O’Sullivan
Drone: Matteo Meldolesi
Assistant director: Francesca Zannoni
Sound design: AMargine

PAESE ANNO
Duration: 9'16"