The Welcoming Citadel

Riva del Garda is the historical gateway between the Garda Lake, and the mountain passes leading to the Austrian border. The winning entry of the competition interprets the remains of the town hospital, incorporating one of its façades, maintaining a connection with the existing facility, and creating new ties with the surrounding urban and natural features. The white pentagonal faced wraps around the inner core clad in recycled wood. The project transforms the usual hospital-like nature of a home for aged people into the loved background of their lives, enhancing its openness to the town.

The words ‘hospital’, ‘hostel’, ‘hotel’ and ‘home’ share a common meaning: built environments whose goal is to protect the varied experience of human life. In our aims, form does not follow function but rather embraces it and amplifies its positive features with the sense of easiness and naturality that marks spaces we love. The former health complex, grown over the years around the semi-central location of the old hospital, seemed to respond to purely technical conditions, giving the character of a closed cluster of rooms. Our proposal aims to reform this condition starting from the design of the common open spaces, the garden and the generous terrace-court on the first level, all carefully designed to ensure privacy and support therapeutic activities. The intersection of its star-shaped perimeter with the pentagonal low-pitched roof generates a broken silhouette which interacts with the masses of the surrounding mountains and amplifies the course of the sun across hours and seasons.

The materials clearly reference the urban and environmental contexts of Riva del Garda in a contemporary key: the stone-like pillars, the palette of the recessed façade, and domestic window rollers reinterpret the town’s civic architecture using updated techniques; the green-grey metal roofing, integrating solar panels, and recycled wood cladding of the court façades resonate with the surrounding mountains and traditional Alpine building practices.The design emphasizes conscious resource use and energy reduction throughout the building’s life cycle, balancing building systems, orientation, and low-emission materials to ensure high energy performance and efficient long-term management, with an envelope combining excellent thermal and acoustic performance and expansive low-emissivity glazing, maximizing daylight while minimizing energy loss. Interior spaces follow this approach, prioritizing function, hygiene, durability, and comfort. This integrated vision earned LEED Gold certification