Under the skies of Gianluca Peluffo’s architecture. Color as a design and landscape strategy

Between 2015 and 2016 Gianluca Peluffo (Peluffo & Partners Architecture) realizes three architectural works where color is the key through which architecture fits into the landscape. These are three very different buildings in terms of size, program, form and materials. Peluffo's approach departs from those authorial color interpretations recognizable in terms of a coherent and systematic "language," such as the interventions of Sauerbruch - Hutton or Jorrit Tornquist. The elementary school in Zugliano in the province of Vicenza, - the first project analyzed - reconstructs through the inclined planes of its roof, the profile of the mountains on the horizon. A solution only apparently mimetic, which instead, places the work halfway between heaven and earth. Thus, the building declares its belonging to the context, but also reinforces its formal characteristics. The IULM extension in Milan, - the second project analyzed - in a suburb that is now almost a center, seems to want to dialogue with its surroundings through the use of materials typical of the built city. Then, suddenly, a red tower and an explosion of emerald green ceramics. Like a traffic light in the fog. In contrast, the headquarters of the BNL - BNP Paribas Real Estate group, - the latest project in this series - is located near the Tiburtina station. In an open, large, iridescent, luminous place, this building with mirrored surfaces is deformed, like a horizontal Brancusi, or a Boccioni painting, to gift and dynamically multiply of the sky of Rome. Gianluca Peluffo in these three projects has, on the one hand, the ability to construct three architectural figures based on color, on the other hand, he demonstrates a marked aptitude for descending into the context by developing on each occasion a different chromatic design strategy. Three inventions then, three ways of making the architectural work dialogue with the context, three exercises in specificity, in which the environmental, atmospheric dimension, identifies a type of "specific color." Three projects that dialogue with three different landscapes, the natural landscape of the Venetian foothills, the post-industrial urban landscape of Milan, and the infrastructured suburbs of Rome. Three landscapes, under three different skies, three atmospheres through which to decline the color of architecture.