African Arts Center

Based in Florence, the African Arts Center project is a venue that aims to explore African Arts in three dimensions: Culinary, Musical and Visual Arts. The importance of the African diaspora in Florence, Italy, is explored in depth by the Black History Month of Florence collective. AAC is a place aimed at enriching the culture of Florence in a rational way.

Located on an existing park on the edge of the Arno river, the project benefits from public space on its ground floor and offers a breathtaking view of Florence at its highest point. The continuous and monumental north façade is addressed to the great landscape, while the south façade, more segmented, responds to a very dense and rhythmic urban context. The avenue of lime trees present on the site is a strong element of the project insofar as the framework of the trees becomes the framework of the structure and the posts. In plan, the project can be read as three volumes of different thicknesses. The thinnest volume, six meters thick, is dedicated to the Culinary Arts, the central one is designed for the Musical Arts, and the thickest, punctuated by a patio, is intended for the Visual Arts. The tension between these different thicknesses, intended for public use, creates a constraint that becomes the driving force of the project. The project thus develops the questions of narrowness, fullness and emptiness in a public space. Indeed, the inversion of the plan generates the shape of the park. Also, the punctual structure allows a freedom of composition of the plan and adapts to the program that contains exhibition spaces for the public, but also studio spaces for artists. The progressive spread of the three volumes aims to compose the section as a mirror of the plan. Indeed, in cross-section, the programs have their own volumes, heights, and roof terraces, opening up unique views of the Florentine landscape and its symbolic elements such as the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The windows, at times long to accompany the movement of visitors, at times fixed as real paintings on the landscape, allow the facade to exist in a singular way. The window in the culinary space is related to the way people eat in Africa, at ground level. Finally, the hybridity of the structure and its materiality, tends to explore the idea of lightness through the use of stone for the facing, concrete for the structure and wood for the filling. African Arts Center is a project in which questions of rationality, framings and hybridity have been explored.