Hospitality by subtraction
At Palazzo Santangelo, when stimuli stop competing for the mind, thought becomes available again
Add.
Increase.
Attention.
When everything increases
It’s difficult to find the thread end when the information around you is overwhelming. When it exceeds your capacity to contain it.
You become an overflowing cistern. The water floods everything and the land becomes uninhabitable.
The land is your mind.
Everyone sells you something more. Along with what you need, they add something for free. It’s the captatio benevolentiae of complimentary parking plus minibar.
Are peace and pleasure really built from accumulated things, rewards, (self-)celebrations?
The rooms don’t repeat the Palace
Sometimes we read that the rooms at Palazzo Santangelo are basic, essential, compared with the monumentality of the Palace. That they don’t repeat it. That they contradict it.
It isn’t negligence.
It’s an idea.
The idea is that minimalism reduces noise and allows the meaning that belongs to each traveler to emerge.
Concentration begins when stimuli stop competing for the mind. The mind starts recognizing its own priorities again. Its own order.
It’s the idea of subtraction.
Active omission
Our proposal, which is our voice, is to let the geometric-spatial dimension of the interiors, the materiality of the Palace and the garden enter into dialogue with the removal of superfluous objects.
It’s an active omission: rejecting the simulation of a lifestyle built by accumulation and freeing a space in which thought can become available again.
Subtract.
Liberate.
At Centro Paolo VI, at Palazzo Santangelo in the center of Brescia, the essential rooms enter into dialogue with the monumentality of the Palace and the garden.
Subtraction becomes a hospitality choice that removes superfluous objects and leaves room for attention and thought.
