Name: Mattia De Lotto
Track: Architecture
Studio: Explore Lab
Year: MSc 3/4 / 2025
Type: Graduation Project
Tutor: Stefano Milani, Elena Longhin, Rufus van den Ban
Description:
The thesis explores the role of architectural practice in addressing the fragility and uncertain futures of the Cadore region in the Italian Alps. Initially guided by the question of architecture’s agency in this context, the research shifts to ask whether the territory requires architectural intervention at all. Framed through a multi-scalar and interdisciplinary lens, Cadore is understood as a palimpsest where ecological, infrastructural, and symbolic forces intersect. Architecture is approached not as a solution, but as a medium of observation, representation, and care. Central to this investigation is the Ex-Cementificio Marchino, a former cement factory in Castellavazzo that once fueled resource extraction during the Great Acceleration. Now an industrial ruin, it offers a critical lens to examine extraction’s legacies while opening opportunities to reframe architecture’s role in a post-industrial Alpine setting. The project proposes a phased strategy of dismantling, re-scaling, and recomposition. By reusing debris from the factory, the site becomes its own quarry, reducing the monumentality of the ruin while embedding it in processes of contextual digestion. New structures, built from reprocessed remnants, accommodate a basecamp for landscape observation, monitoring, and community engagement. Linked to a new inhabited wall, the reconfigured ruin operates as both civic infrastructure and symbolic filter, restoring the territory and orienting it towards renewed connections.