SALT PAN HOUSE — bruschystudio

bruschystudio

Salt-Pan House

CATEGORY

Architecture
Competition

COLLABORATION

Lea Bradašević
Eleonora Popovska
Aleksandar Vrangaloski

LOCATION

Sečovlje, Slowenien

YEAR

2019

Challenge

This competition invites proposals for a temporary intervention that halts the further decay of one of the remaining salt-pan houses at Sečovlje Salina Nature Park. The aim is to create a spatial model for cultural heritage preservation in the southern part of the salt-pans.

Once home to over a hundred salt-making houses, only around seventy ruins remain today—silent witnesses of a once-thriving industry in Piran. Heritage preservation requires new interventions, even modest ones. This project offers a chance to rethink the balance between cultural memory and natural landscape, and to propose a confident model of co-existence in the European spirit of preservation.

Concept

Doppio ritratto dei duchi di Urbino . 1457 - 1462
Piero della Francesca
Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze

By abstracting and detaching the negative from the original form, the design invites the viewer to mentally reconstruct what once stood here. This absence becomes a presence - an open space for imagination, memory and reflection. In its place, a new layer emerges, one that coexists with the old through subtle echoes, voids, and alignments.

This approach fosters a dialogue between past and present, allowing the landscape to carry both simultaneously. The superimposition of historical absence and contemporary intervention transforms the site into a living archive - one that offers each visitor a personal and evolving encounter with history, space and meaning.

At its core, the project seeks to communicate the message of raising awareness of the environmental and cultural loss surrounding the Sečovlje Salina and the vanishing way of life it once sustained.

It proposes not only a reflection on what has been lost, but also a conservation-driven approach: a transferable model that can be applied to other abandoned structures in the region. As both a gesture of remembrance and a forward-looking strategy, it aims to inspire the revitalization of cultural heritage through thoughtful, place-specific interventions.

Faced with the steady decay of the abandoned saltworks houses, the need arose to create a spatial reminder—an evocative place that invites reflection on the memory and meaning of what once was.

The intervention manifests as the absent mass of the ruin, occupying the void and echoing its negative space. Rather than a literal reconstruction, it stands as a simulacrum of the past—a deliberate abstraction that honors the original while leaving space for interpretation. In doing so, it transforms loss into presence, inviting visitors to engage with both memory and imagination.

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