Balena Bianca (White Whale) is a project that sought to study and concretise the relationship between Urbino and its territory.

A constant reverberation since its origins, in which the city besieged even before being besieged. This was precisely the cue needed to identify the location, size and character of this intervention. A project that reduces its composition to two main signs: the longitudinal body, developed on three levels, which responds to various activities, and the circular arena, which aims to become the stage for the entire installation. A form that stems from the need to make the horses, the real protagonists of the whole project, run in a sort of theatre in front of the architecture. The two architectures enter into a relationship with each other and with the landscape through a series of walkways, which in the case of the main elevation towards Urbino, also become an opportunity to bring the interior into communication with the landscape. An introverted logic, but at the same time open to the context. The whole manifests itself as a sort of white whale, attempting to paraphrase Moby Dick, a masterpiece of American literature. While in that case the whale moved in the vastness of the ocean, here it is positioned on a hilly terrain that nevertheless well reproduces that sense of movement and infinity typical of the sea. The white volume, like a timeless and shapeless monolith, seemingly devoid of functions on the outside, becomes full of life and events on the inside, in a reinterpretation of the meaning of the whale that characterised Melville’s novel yesterday and this enterprise today.