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🟢 Scala San Filippo by @caarpa_ is An Espace Autre in Genoa 🟢

This is not a greenhouse. This is not a staircase. This isn’t even a garden. Scala San Filippo in Genoa, by caarpa, is a 40 sq. m. liminal, contemplative space in the heart of a private garden, where a pistachio-green sculptural staircase encounters rugged stone walls, glazed surfaces, reed screens, linen curtains, and chickens wandering among watering cans, gardening tools, and fragments of reclaimed marble.

Scala San Filippo eludes fixed definitions, simultaneously functioning as a staircase, greenhouse, garden, observatory, and domestic refuge—without fully becoming any of them. Treating the garden as a space of nature, memory, and heterotopia, caarpa embraces Foucault’s description of it as “the smallest parcel of the world and the totality of the world” (1986), carefully recalibrating a series of relationships: wilderness and construction, antiquity and contemporaneity, opacity and transparency, permanence and transformation.

In turn, Rosario Assunto described the garden as “neither pure nature nor pure artifice, but an aesthetic and ethical synthesis” (1988). Scala San Filippo embodies precisely this condition. Neither building nor landscape, neither object nor infrastructure, it operates as a device for transition, contemplation, and embodied movement. The greenhouse becomes less an enclosure than a threshold; the staircase, less an element of circulation than an invitation to wander. Ultimately, Scala San Filippo reminds us that architecture does not always require monumentality to reshape our perception of a place; sometimes, a single, carefully calibrated gesture is enough to redefine an entire world.

✍️ @melina.arvaniti.pollatou
📸 @annapositano | @studio_campo_photography

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