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Scale Model of 13th-Century Basilica, Made of Wire Mesh, Rises in Italy

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An ethereal tribute to fallen architecture

In Italy's Puglia region, artist Edoardo Tresoldi has devised a rather ingenious, simple scheme to revive architectural artifacts lost to the ravages of time: wire mesh, full-scale models.

Funded by the local ministry of cultural heritage and activities, MiBACT, Tresoldi's installation, a full-scale recreation of the earthquake-damaged, abandoned 13th-century Basilica di Siponto—in an archaeological park of the same name—is meant to evoke the site's history and the built environment's general transience. It's also not the artist's first foray into mesh works that straddle the line between art and architecture: He's done similar work in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe.

Visitors to the Siponto site can walk beneath the recreated barrel-vaulted archways and among the colonnades beneath a peaked roof reminiscent of Romanesque architecture of the period. Interspersed among the wire-mesh architecture are real-life "scalies," the people that populate architectural renderings, and are used here, as there, to give a sense of proportion.

At night, the structure is illuminated, giving the entire thing a ghostly air befitting its context and purpose.

edoardo tresoldi resurrects archeological remains in puglia using wire mesh [Designboom]

∙ [Curbed]