Slate-covered walls frame this swimming pool created by architecture studio LAD in the grounds of an Italian villa, which delivers swimmers views of the surrounding hills and valleys (+ movie).

Rome-based LAD – brief for Laboratorio di Architettura e Design – designed the Fontanile Pool for the proprietor of a villa that sits below the old city walls of the Italian city Tarquinia, about fifty five miles north of the capital.

Fontanile Pool by Matteo Bianchi and Francesco Napolitano

Designed for swimming lengths, the long and narrow pool is dug into a lawn to the rear of the house. Slate panels cover the two the insides and outdoors of the construction, as effectively as a slip that permits water to movement over one end in the style of an infinity pool.

The architects picked the grey stone for the blue-green tinge it gives the water, assisting it to harmonise with the lawn.

Fontanile Pool by Matteo Bianchi and Francesco Napolitano

A teak sun deck sits to 1 finish. Measures lead down from the decking into the pool, exactly where the open finish faces the rolling countryside beneath the fortified city.


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“The Fontanile Pool is created to be a machine for observing the landscape,” explained architects Francesco Napolitano and Matteo Bianchi.

“Two stone walls are framing the nature close to, isolating a single stage of view, like an optical device. These components website link with each other three open air spaces: landscape, pool, deck.”

Fontanile Pool by Matteo Bianchi and Francesco Napolitano

“The task aims to produce a space in harmony with nature and artifice, with the countryside and the city, making it possible for for contemplation of the landscape,” they informed Dezeen.

“The form and the proportions of this work remind you of the outdated country fountains of the surroundings.”

Fontanile Pool by Matteo Bianchi and Francesco Napolitano

The consumer approached the architects following studying an report about their previously completed Villae Minimae project – a assortment of five dwellings conceived as optical gadgets, balanced on rocks, in fields and on cliff sides to frame specific views of the landscape. He asked them to design the pool with the same idea.

“As everybody is aware of, Contemporary architects believed that homes were machines for living,” mentioned the architects, referencing the well-known quote by early 20th-century architect Le Corbusier.

Fontanile Pool by Matteo Bianchi and Francesco Napolitano

“With the Villae Minimae we ironically played with this notion and attempted to re-feel a home as a machine for observing the landscape, without having overlooking the performance of the spaces.”

“The Fontanile is not a home of program, but anyhow it functions like an optical device – it suggests you a single stage of see, the route the place the sun is setting in summer,” they stated. “It performs like a visual joint in between the observer, the city and the countryside.”

Fontanile Pool by Matteo Bianchi and Francesco Napolitano Diagram Fontanile Pool by Matteo Bianchi and Francesco NapolitanoProgram, area and elevation  Dezeen

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