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Below the ramparts of the Corte citadel in Corsica, France, Orma Architettura rebuilds Office Orma Architettura on the footprint of a decayed pagliaghju, a gabled stone volume on a square plan.
Below the ramparts of the Corte citadel, where the Finosa and Zurmulu mountains fold down toward the town, a small stone building stands on ground that once held a pagliaghju, one of the dry-stone shelters Corsican farmers raised across the island to store hay and thresh grain. By the time Orma Architettura came to it, the old structure had slid into advanced decay, little more than a low ruin among the walls of its holding. What sits there now keeps to that footprint, close enough to read as a return rather than a replacement.
The studio built the work as its own office, and treated the vanished shelter as a brief rather than a keepsake. A gabled volume rises on a square plan, its pitch and proportions taking their cues from the rural buildings scattered across the surrounding slopes. Nothing about it announces itself. From the bend in the road below, it reads as one more stone mass gathered under the mountains, marked out only by the precision of its openings and the fresh cut of its roof.
Those openings carry the argument. Tall, narrow windows are cut cleanly through thick stone walls, their frames set deep so that daylight enters in vertical slots rather than broad sheets. A pitched stone roof caps the volume, its slabs laid flat to the weather. Around the base, the ruined enclosure walls of the old holding are left in place, mossed and half-collapsed, and the new work leans into them instead of sweeping them away. Old fabric and new sit inside the same frame.
Inside, the register changes entirely. Board-formed concrete meets pale timber joinery and a polished terrazzo floor, with a cast concrete sink, a recessed hearth stacked with logs, a stair turned in poured concrete, and study models resting on a steel shelf below a deep timber-framed window. For a practice working at the foot of a mountain town, the building reads as a statement of method: to build in Corte is to build with what the place has always built with, and to carry a fading rural type forward into use rather than into ruin.
