Old Convent of Clarisse | Treviso

The Convento Clarisse is an important historical complex in the heart of Castelfranco Veneto. Since its origins around 1500 it was part of the social, urban and cultural occasions in the city of the famous painter Giorgione. While the morphology of this place around a cloister system was transformed over the centuries, the original structure of a small church attached to the cloister gradually changed. Morphological changes were: new buildings, expansions, elevations, demolitions. These countless actions, often inconsistent with each other, and irreverent to a past that was fading over the decades, have given the urban landscape of Castelfranco a complex that, apart from the original use, was repeatedly changed to be: barracks, a riding school, a hospital, a home for the elderly, a shooting range. Since the beginning of the 2000s it is in a state of disrepair. In this already difficult situation a non-linear administrative path has been established that has turned the entire compendium into a system of contradictory constraints, making recovery and enhancement difficult, if not impossible.
Hence a competition was announced to define a project capable of implementing an integrated recovery plan. Within the framework of this plan all the interested entities should interact, and a round table with all the institutional subjects should be opened up. These subjects would have to negotiate at least partly the boundaries of their respective decision-making and regulatory spheres in various ways, to reach a greater good, or to give back the ensemble of the former Convento Clarisse to the city of Castelfranco.
A multidisciplinary team worked for 3 years on this project, creating a strategy of a historical, stratigraphic, and iconographic reconstruction. The team collected data and proposed alternative scenarios of recovery and development of the ensemble, and modulated conservation factors with market needs, all this with respect to the architectural traces of a faded but nevertheless central path in the urban history of the city. The result was a recovery plan that got the approval from all the parties in charge, with an intervention plan with differentiated operating schedules for the various functional areas of the structure, proposing functions and architectural suggestions able to open up a dialogue with the past and projecting the convento into the contemporary world.