Otto's house is one of the historic houses in Budoia, a small town in the Pordenone foothills. This building, like most of the poorer historic buildings, was also built with load-bearing stone masonry from the nearby Artugna stream and chestnut wood floors. Although the strong earthquake of 1976 did not cause major damage to the structures, the static conditions did not certainly allow its use, so the new owners wanted to restore it by relying on the ELASTICOFarm studio, which has an office nearby and from which other works in the area, such as the Yuppie Ranch House, the "Uccello Caduto" Square and "Top Gun" house, have been coordinated.
After witnessing the havoc due to faux-philological restoration and manipulation interventions, designing in a well-known and beloved historic area provoked in the designers a sense of insecurity and great responsibility, and with them the awareness that they were holding one of the last fragments of an ancient history, a precious piece that had survived over time thanks to its fragility and poverty.
A number of interventions in the 1970s and 1980s had left their mark: fortunately a testimony to a way of thinking that in this case did not heavily affect the original building as it did on other occasions where important historic buildings and entire valuable sections of the original urban fabric were devastated.
But how to renovate in a seismic zone without affecting the original building, without altering the proportions and, above all, without losing that sense of fragility that for the designers was the most valuable thing about the house?
ELASTICOFarm decided to intervene invisibly on the outside, as if it were a monument available only in its interior, where the needs of contemporary living would still transform the space and, with it, the language and materials. For this reason only inside, stone infill walls alternate with reinforced concrete load-bearing structures cast in wooden formwork, which, finely deformed, produce a soft effect, suitable for the building's domestic use.
A sculptural staircase, the fulcrum of the new intervention, connecting the various floors and separating the different rooms, has a distributive function but also a structural one.
Its shape acts as a wind brace for the entire building, giving the other partitions the only function of resisting vertical loads. It is an unexpected sculptural structure within a system of regular spaces that work on the relationship between different materials, an accent of color and material that simultaneously denounces its structural and decorative function.
The sought and obtained result is that Otto's House seems to have never been restored and seems to have absorbed the passage of time by adapting to changes and different uses in a continuum with its own history, transforming the poverty of its origins into a value and the fragility of its structures into a testimony of resistance.
