An enormous affective and emotional value towards this project translated into and assortment of curated strategies and decisions in order to respect the building’s memory.
The preservation of the stage and amphitheatre, deeply rooted in the town’s collective memory, had to be negotiated along with the very tight program required by the client. Maintaining a healthy balance between new uses and the characteristic features of the original building became the challenge of this project.
The old Casa del Poble was an infrastructure closely linked to the people and very rooted in popular culture. Our project wants to magnify this parallelism by engaging with industry, local craftsmen and the environment, in its broadest sense. Thus, the new expansion will be built with local sandstone – marès – a prevalent material throughout the island. Research about he traditional ways of using the sandstone and "thinking with the hands" shows that marès can perform its full potential, revealing its great economic and ecological advantages. Its low weight and proximity reduces transportation to a minimum, while low processing and extraction make it a construction material with a smaller ecological footprint.