Academic
The Log
2021 - Milan, Italy
The Log was born from a scene in the schoolyard at Alda Merini Secondary School in Milan: students dragging heavy timber logs across the garden, arranging them into a circle for their little shows. That gesture stayed with us. We wanted to hold onto what already belonged to them — the ritual, the weight, the joy of it — and turn it into architecture. The result is a bright, open auditorium where the stage can expand by folding back the wall and spilling out into the garden.
overview
project narrative
The Log was born from a scene in the schoolyard at Alda Merini Secondary School in Milan: students dragging heavy timber logs across the garden, arranging them into a circle for their little shows. That gesture stayed with us. We wanted to hold onto what already belonged to them — the ritual, the weight, the joy of it — and turn it into architecture. The result is a bright, open auditorium where the stage can expand by folding back the wall and spilling out into the garden.
An acoustic and spatial research into curved timber construction as both structure and skin.
project info
details
process
development
The design is built on a single contrast: the heavy log and the light shell. The auditorium is conceived as the log — grounded, solid, opaque, anchored to the earth. The foyer is its opposite: as light as it can be, transparent, semi-open, and semi-conditioned. That tension between mass and weightlessness came directly from the students themselves — from the effort of moving something heavy to create something joyful, from turning a pile of timber into a circle, and a circle into a shared place.
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