Art, architecture and design are at the heart of Casa Italia Paris, the venue that will welcome the Italian athletes during the Olympic Games in Paris from 26 July to 11 August 2024
On the occasion of the XXXIII Olympic Games scheduled to take place in Paris from 26 July to 11 August 2024, CONI has chosen a symbolic Olympic venue to accommodate the athletes of the Italy Team and its guests. Casa Italia Paris 2024 will be at Le Pré Catelan, a Napoleon III-style building immersed in the city’s largest park, the Bois de Boulogne, a few steps from the Champs Élysées. It was in this building, inaugurated in 1856, which immediately entered the hearts of the citizens of the Ville Lumière, that on the evening of 23 June 1894 the dinner celebrating the birth of the Olympic Games of the modern era, announced by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, took place.
Ensemble is the concept at the basis of the Casa Italia Paris 2024 project, a new stage in an evolutionary process that over the years has progressively transformed the athletes’ home from Hospitality House to an internationally recognized brand able to represent the story of Italian culture and the Country System through its excellence.
Developing the concept of Ensemble, Casa Italia Paris 2024 will transform Le Pré Catelan – a building articulated into different spaces flooded with light, thanks to its numerous glass windows and surrounding garden – into a beautiful and emotional itinerary, an all-encompassing work in which nature, art, architecture, furniture design and lighting design dialogue with each other. The restyling of the garden with essences belonging to the Italian landscape, the works of art, the setting up of the rooms and the design give life to a different space, inspired by the great interiors of the Italian tradition and the 20th-century masters who made Italian creativity famous throughout the world and gave shape to the vocation for hospitality that has always distinguished us.
Artists and designers of Casa Italia Paris 2024
The itinerary is marked by the works of 19 artists at the forefront of contemporary Italian art – Vincenzo Agnetti, Marco Bernardi, Giovanni Bonotto, Sergio Breviario, Claire Fontaine, Paolo Delle Monache, Alberto Di Fabio, Agostino Iacurci, Francesco Jodice, Margherita Moscardini, Matteo Nasini, Gabriele Picco, Julie Polidoro, Riccardo Previdi, Edoardo Tresoldi, Marinella Senatore, Stalker, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Fabio Viale – and by the creations of 28 internationally renowned designers for 9 companies that represent the excellence of Italian design.
Francesco Binfaré, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Jacopo Foggini, Masanori Umeda for Edra; Marco Lavit, Patrick Norguet, Marcello Ziliani for Ethimo; Mario Bellini, Piero Lissoni, Patricia Urquiola, Tokujin Yoshioka for Glas Italia; Ron Arad, Tord Boontje, Sebastian Herkner, Marc Thorpe for Moroso; Brodie Neill for Riva 1920, which are the companies that have been working with Casa Italia for several years now. These have been joined byMonica Armani, Mario Bellini, Antonio Citterio, Piero Lissoni, Gaetano Pesce, Patricia Urquiola for B&B Italia, Michael Anastassiades, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Piero Lissoni, Jasper Morrison, Barber & Osgerby, Marcel Wanders for Flos, De Pas – D’Urbino – Lomazzi, Ettore Sottsass, Superstudio for Poltronova, Formafantasma, Nava+Arosio for Rubelli.
The architectural project
The architectural project is based on the link between the new and the existing, between artifice and nature; the first interpretation of the concept of Ensemble is that of interweaving, already inherent in the Olympic Circles. According to sociologist Tim Ingold, the world, in this case the Olympic world, can be thought of as a mesh, a fabric of lines knotted together where the knots are the center of things. It is the fabric that makes manifest the interweaving of threads, that is, the idea of building together through ties, and it is the fabric that is the main material of the setting of Casa Italia. Conceived as a series of rooms within rooms, the Casa appears as a succession of new rooms installed in the 19th-century architecture of Pré Catelan using a semi-transparent fabric, in a continuous process of mutual enhancement that also reverberates in the outdoor spaces.
This incessant osmosis also emerges in the furnishings, in which a careful selection of iconic design elements, both from the past and contemporary, emphasizes a strong dialogue, both aesthetic and of meaning with the context and the setting, through the choice of shapes, colors, and materials.
Environmental sustainability
Great attention has been paid to environmental sustainability. In fact, the predominant use of natural and recycled fabrics, which decrease the overall weight of fitting materials, lowering CO2 emissions, allows the project to be sustainable and reduce its environmental impact. Italian design objects that are inherently sustainable are also used in the furnishings, not only because of the efforts of all the companies involved in the design of the product life cycle with virtuous processes, but also because they are intended to last and be handed down over time.
Many design elements were chosen or created to express this ecological sensibility through a strong aesthetic and material component: furniture in wood, terracotta, enameled lava, raw fabrics, cellulose, and recycled plastic. The press room at Casa Italia, for example, will also be zero-impact thanks to the protocol signed with the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Safety, and the support of Federlegno and its member companies.
