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©2026 elleemme studio
CORSO.
culture del Contemporaneo
location
year
status
program
elleemme studio team
Vicenza, Italy
2025
competition entry
cultural centre/adaptive reuse
Ludovico Basharzad
Marco Tedesco
Located on Corso Fogazzaro in the historic centre of Vicenza, the former Cinema Corso is a late rationalist building that has stood empty for decades.
Our proposal for CORSO. Culture del Contemporaneo, the competition launched by Fondazione Giuseppe Roi, imagines its transformation into an incubator for contemporary art: a place where artists, performers, designers and schools can produce, experiment and share their work.
The project starts from a single, radical gesture. The historic envelope is fully preserved, while the interior is emptied and a new self-supporting timber structure is inserted within it. The result is a pure, continuous volume, over six metres high and without corners: a white room that works as a neutral matrix, ready to be constantly reinterpreted by the events it hosts.
The idea pays homage to the Palladian lesson. In the dense fabric of Vicenza, the project opens a fertile void, turning it from a static background into an active device for cultural production.
Around this void, the building is organised by levels, each able to operate independently. The basement becomes a creative laboratory with workshops, storage and a recording room. The ground floor is the public stage, a space that can shift from exhibition to conference to immersive performance. The upper floors host offices and residencies for artists.
Technology is part of the architecture rather than an addition to it. A modular ceiling grid supports lights, sound and projections, the skylight can be fully darkened, and a 3x3 metre lifting platform connects the laboratory to the stage below, bringing artworks, sets and performers up into the room.
Built entirely with dry, prefabricated construction, the new structure never touches the existing walls. It is fully reversible: in the future, the former cinema will be able to welcome new functions without heavy demolition. A building designed not for a single use, but for everything contemporary art has yet to become.