“Spring comes with flowers, autumn with the moon, summer with the breeze, winter with snow. When idle concerns don’t fill your thoughts, that’s your best season.” – Wumen Huikai

The new pavilion in front of Villa Emma

The project for this new building presents itself as a box containing and telling the story of a group of Jewish kids, who were welcomed during the Second World War in Villa Emma, which became their shelter and their home for a couple of years.

The pavilion is conceived as an isolated and sculptural object that assumes a symbolic and representative value for the Villa itself. The concept that lies behind the design is the one of the «pavilion surrounded by green”, resulting in a clear structure distributed on one level that achieves a perfect integration with the green environment surrounding it.

The area where the pavilion stands used to be crossed by the kids to reach the center of the village of Nonantola from the Villa. In order to resemble that path, the pavilion is designed as a completely permeable space to be crossed.

Beyond the mirror

The aim is to create a space from where the Villa the place of memories completely visible. The facade is thus developed around the idea of transparency and reflection; it is entirely glazed and covered with films according to a progressive mirror gradient in order to maintain, physically and metaphorically, the visual connection with Villa Emma The pavilion becomes a filter more or less intense through which the historical memory can survive and be read.

The seasons of the kids of Villa Emma

The idea of seasonality plays the main role in the development of the concept; through the definition of a dynamic image that represents the march of time, the different times of the year have been displayed as the symbol of the seasons spent by the kids at Villa Emma.
The seasonal garden offers different types of plants: the garden and the courtyard are composed of a mix of evergreen, deciduous plants, shrubs and flowers with different blooming.

Consequently, each season is strongly characterised by different colors and shades, using the immediacy of color as a form of communication. Thanks to this concept the exhibition pavilion gives the visitors always a multiple and different image of itself, susceptible to the time changing the different points of view.