SKYWALKS PASSERELLE VOLANTI
Location: Palazzo Grillo, Genoa, Italy
Client: OAGE - Ordine degli Architetti della Provincia di Genova
Typology-tag: Exhibition, installation, book, urban, public
Phase: Concept, definitive, detailed design, construction
Design Team: Matteo Orlandi, Caterina Galli, Martina Tortello, Simonetta Rosso
Photography: Anna Positano, Matteo Orlandi
Link: tussedizioni.net
Year: 2018
"Passerelle Volanti", literally “Flying walkways” is a new invented name for bridges and suspended pedestrian walkways of various shapes and sizes that connect houses to streets by taking advantage of the different elevations that characterize the geography of the city of Genoa.
These urban elements accompany the daily movements of the inhabitants and can be found everywhere, but they are now almost invisible to those who routinely walk along them every day. Instead, they are surprising to those who visit Genoa for the first time and have the opportunity to walk along them discovering views and panoramas of the city otherwise impossible in any other way.
They were built over time and spontaneously by inhabitants to solve some missing functions: to provide the possibility of an entrance/exit at a higher elevation directly to the street or to a bus stop, to extend the apartment and colonize the retaining walls with hanging gardens and simply to overcome sudden elevation changes. Together they are the silent binder of this city that connects public and private spaces in an almost infinite network.
Skywalks / Passerelle Volanti is a winning project of the call "Amate l'Architettura" launched by the Foundation of the Order of Architects of Genoa that investigates and recounts the great capacity of the inhabitants of this city in having explored throughout history spontaneous and surprising architectural solutions by interpreting the cues offered by a territory compressed between sea and mountains. It consists of an exhibition and a book.
The exhibition is an immersive journey through these suspended passages to tell the story of Genoa and its urban landscapes in a new way. The prestigious 16th-century rooms of Palazzo Grillo have been mapped with the 3d mapping technique and used, together with multiform backdrops designed and built for the occasion, as a backdrop for immersive projections that tell the life of a community through its way of transforming the environment in which it lives through everyday gestures.
The book Skywalks / Flying Walkways, which accompanies the exhibition and is still available, is a photographic and textual atlas that collects a selection of walkways by organizing them by exploratory and qualitative categories. It also contains short essays, reflections and short stories by Italian authors set on catwalks. After the exhibition and the book the term “Passerelle Volanti” has come into common use.