Adriatic station: a civilized new services building in the historic port of Otranto aims to consolidate and expand Italy's Adriatic connections.

Otranto port accommodates yachts, local fishing boats, and freighters that haul cement products across the Adriatic. Also to be found here are vessels of the coastguard and customs service as the Italian state monitors the waterways between Puglia ('the heel of Italy'), Albania and Corfu. Alongside the port, the Stazione Marittima by Mario Cucinella Architects has a hybrid programme. It processes foot passengers and provides services for port users, as well as housing the security/intelligence operations of Italy in the southern Adriatic.

The building is a stepped linear form thrusting at an acute angle towards the sea. Clad in local limestone, the Stazione Marittima is conceptualized as a geological or topographic fragment parallel to a low escarpment. Its harbour elevation tilts out at approximately 8 degrees from the vertical; the elevation to the Adriatic at twice that incline. The key facade is south-west towards the Old Town. Cucinella has stepped its entire form to create an outdoor auditorium and meeting place, a terminus to a new civic promenade leading up onto part of an extensive roof terrace. From there, you look back to the town with its fortress walls designed by Francesco di Giorgio Martini in the early sixteenth century.

Despite its codified brief and a comparatively modest budget ([euro]2 million, roughly [pounds sterling]1.3 million), the Stazione Marittima is designed with gestural, contextual and urbanistic intent. From the Old Town, its north-west flank appears to reply to the splayed Renaissance fortifications. The new building glides alongside the port like a frozen ship. With the coastguard occupying the more secure prow area, the hull is publicly accessible across a new piazza screened from heat and glare by a pergola of perforated aluminium lamellae on tall slim columns.

From the old ramparts, a line of lights leads to the Stazione Marittima; in the evening its long north-west facade is washed from the pavement in artificial light. Cucinella's elevation south-west onto his new piazzetta is split in two with ziggurat-like stepping towards the harbour and a sloping glass roof and entryway inland by the cliff face. Through the glass, planes of solid colour--orange, green, blue -- are visible. The little-seen elevation against the natural rock is a deep red, as are service elements on the stone-paved roof terrace (a chromatic reference to Malaparte's villa on Capri?) With devices including radar concealed behind a simple grill fence, citizens of Otranto now have a panoramic finale to their passeggiata.

Di Giorgio Martini's fortress walls splay outwards, down to the sea to repel marauding buccaneers. Cucinella's form inverts that geometry, expanding as it meets the sky and views of the Adriatic (glimpsed through the archways of a secondary defensive wall). This, then, is clearly not a traditional load-bearing masonry wall. The Pietra di Lecce stone panels have been glued to the primary concrete structure with minimal interstitial joints. Rather than accepting today's typically homogeneous finish achieved by diamond-cutting techniques, Cucinella chose a more archaic rough-hewn method, then mixed stone from different zones of the quarry so that the final assemblage has a lively texture.

A darker Soleto stone dads the tiered theatre and base of the tilted facades, and a third, from Apriceno, is used for paving details. Towards the harbour, fenestration is contained in two strips of deeply-set, horizontal cuts. With windows flush to vertical internal wall, the Pietra di Lecce folds in from the facade to wrap reveals, lintels and cills, so augmenting the perception of building mass.

Once the building is operational, the public will circulate around a double-height hall beneath the sloping glass to buy travel tickets and get maritime information. Offices overlook harbour activity while ancillary services are aligned alongside the low cliff to the rear. The more security-conscious, forward section of the Stazione Marittima has command rooms, a canteen at ground level, accommodation for service personnel and the commandant's private flat above. An internal corridor receives daylight through small, circular skylights. Facing the harbour, both sections of the building, separated by a vertical zip of Soleto stone, have deep doorways cut at the same angle.

Otranto is unlike other projects from the Cucinella studio. The practice is best known for its environmentally sensitive assembly of lightweight components, for instance the iGuzzini headquarters at Recanati, near Ancona (AR February 1999). Otranto is more expressive, a kind of trigger to future urban growth , and a representation of an ancient indigenous material in an unmistakably contemporary fashion.

RELATED ARTICLE: Architect Mario Cucinella Architects, Bologna

Photographs

Jean de Calan