Piazza Caricamento

The waterfront of the city of Genoa is rich in protagonists inside a single panoramic view: the bright colors of the buildings, their different ages and styles, the elements of viability along the coast – palms, lamps, furnishings – and the speeding cars, and, finally, the gulf, with its boats, sea and the significant design by Renzo Piano. Piazza Caricamento is lodged among this richness of architectural presences, which also provide material heterogeneity. Like an intense moment experienced throughout the length of a day, the piazza is a significant opening point for the visual in the itinerary along the waterfront. In this specific case, the paving needed to be a homogeneous background for this abundance of actors, for the scale of the city, accompanying the sinuous geometry of the gulf, for the scale of pedestrians, who can perceptively interpret, on a superficial level, the scenario of which the base horizontal plane is part. The selected flooring was Colombino, with its light veigns and its variable gray hues, occasionally marked by modest brownish contents. The strong thickness – 12 cm – is also used to mark the superficial plane with deep oblique lines, carved within the base rectangle, with edges that highlight the joints between the slabs. These are simply placed side by side, with variable dimensions, although their typical width is constant for each row of slabs. They are alternated with elements containing opposite oblique grooves: the evident effect under natural light is that of a sort of bi-colored appearance obtained between immediately adjacent slabs, adding thickness to the range of chromatic possibilities already naturally offered by stone. The same lytic essence follows punctual raised areas of the flooring with specific elements.