Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery, Genoa 1994

NERVE CENTRE

Substantial restoration work and the design of essential elements hidden from view have enabled this seventeenth century villa to become the Genoa Modern Art Museum.

The historical architectural style has been completely preserved, a typical example of the modus vivendi of the great families of Genoa, a country villa or palais d’été dating back to 1590 and complete with family chapel, greenhouses and stables.

Work on the interior consists of the creation of an accessible “second skin” to conceal the museum’s “nerve centre” fitted with special systems, allowing large scale pictures to be mounted. These plasterboard walls, as big as 7 x 4 m, turn smoothly on a single hinge.

The lightness of the rooms is accompanied by a colour scansion that changes as you walk through the museum, drawing inspiration from the tones of the villa interior and its restored facades, heightening them like in an abstract painting.

Indirect light, pointing upwards, artificially recreates the natural diffuse light of the sky.

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery

Modern Art Gallery