tisselli studio architetti: VC1

tisselli studo architetti. VC1 2005-2008. south face and sectiontisselli studio architetti, which is Filippo Tissilli, Cinzia Mondello and Filippo Tombaccini, recently sent a project package to us for a four-storey apartment building in Cesena, completed in 2008. 
It is very dramatic – the description outlines the desire to give this building an identity beyond the numb suburban development that surrounds it, however, tisselli studio explain this in a wonderfully italianate way:

'Beyond the mere functional description of the intervention, the focus is still the wish to install an architectural quality to the directional vertexes of the building, refusing the homologation to the reassuring and anonymous morphology of the surrounding buildings.
The classic and consolidated residential functions can be found in a 'box' — a parallelepiped volume which, even in the tension of the planning, 'lives' and rotates along an axis parallel to the ground, almost lifting from the earth its most representative face.'

VC1 appears to be designed through a too-close camera lens, so typical of dramatic professional architectural photography with sharp points and soaring angles.  How did this very strange photographic convention develop?  Did photographers, not being architects, think that architecture was too static, too boring, and needed an injection of vertigo to make it all more interesting?   Perhaps.  However, VC1 is a wood frame building over a parking garage, inexpensive and conventional. It is the rotation of the outer envelope in the drawing stage that transforms the building into visual dynamism.   I quite like the rather scruffy and endearing ground plane of this project, not soaring, dramatic or abstract, but a real place.

A brave project in a relatively uncongenial environment where form is the only element that speaks of anything other than the ordinary.  As we all know, there is no such thing as an ordinary life, only ordinary budgets, conventions, rules, codes.  This seems to be a careful and thoughtful way to give a language of identity to an otherwise ordinary apartment block.
tisselli studio architetti. VC1, a residential project in the suburbs of Cesena, Itally, 2008