Location_Pero, Milan
Year_2024-2025
Area_200 mq
Client_Privat
Service_Preliminary and executive project, building site direction
The renovation of a single-family home offers an opportunity to work on a local identity torn apart by the explosion of suburban construction.
The historical toponym, Cassina del Pero, inspires a reinterpretation of the architectural features of the Lombard farmhouse, particularly the walled courtyard and the loggia.
The enclosure provides privacy to the garden and includes a detached garage into a hortus conclusus. The double loggia expands each room outward, revolutionizing the original living standard.
Material continuity, formal counterpoint, and radical color are the foundation of an
abstract language able to handle the farmhouse typological archetype without historicism.
Urban Context
The small town of Pero is suspended between integration into Milan and the affirmation of its own identity. A dualism of divergent forces is evident in the territory’s inability to remain cohesive and legible. The state road that cuts through the town center, despite being bustling with human activity, is unable to bring order to a complex area crossed by Italy’s most important highway, the Metro Line 1 and bordered by enormous building complexes such as the Fiera, the Expo area and Cascina Merlata shopping mall, to name just the most notable.
In this context, every architectural intervention must verify its impact: whether it is part of the expanding chaos or whether it attempts to reestablish a legible order in the territory.
Iconogenesis
The assignment to renovate a single-family home built in the 1940s reflects these urban premises, leading the project to explore two ancestral archetypes of local construction.
Drawing on the historical toponym, Cassina del Pero, the project reinterpret some of the architectural features of the Lombard farmhouse.
Two elements were identified as being interesting for a contemporary reinterpretation: the enclosure courtyard and the loggia.
The high enclosure of the farmhouses was redescovered to create more privacy in the garden. The modest existing courtyard could thus become an outdoor room within the house.
The loggia likewise finds its strength in extending every room of the house outward, thus multiplying the available surface area, without increasing the volume, which the local building laws would not have permitted in any case. The loggia of one of the farmhouses in Pero, Molino Dorino, dictates the rules for the form of loggias: a continuous descending pitch and perimeter piers.
The building reaffirms its place in the urban fabric, specifically as the head element of a small row of residential buildings that defines a curtain alignment in an area characterized by severe urban disorganization of the built environment.
The existing structure, while lacking particular architectural value, boasted considerable available volume, especially considering that the attic, accessible only by a ladder through a trapdoor, simply asked to be restored and made accessible as a normal floor of the house, increasing the total surface area by a third. The ungainly façade, entirely blind on the short side, featured stucco-adorned windows on the side walls, a legacy of a petty bourgeois sense of decorum.
The loggia is the quintessential typological element of contemporary residential architecture in the post-COVID era. In it, the subtle boundary between public and private life broadens, becoming a spatial threshold, a diaphragm whose characteristics of opaqueness and transparency can vary depending on the facing sides and the elevation above ground level.
The loggia is the theater of the sophisticated relationship between individual and society, between public and private. It is the place where a house expresses its dual nature: being a protected space and, at the same time, part of a larger urban community.
The section of the blind façade on Via Trieste reveals, in all its iconic clarity, the iconographic archetype of the house. Like a razor cut, the form stands out.
The final volume appears as a hollowed-out monolithic block, in which the loggias no longer appear as volumetric additions, but rather as subtractions, excavations.
The abstraction of language, as a necessary practice for handling the historical typological archetype of the farmhouse without getting burned, leads to a single-material architecture stripped of any reference to the technology with which it was built. Mixed masonry, reinforced concrete pillars, wooden beams, everything is hidden behind the abstract plastered skin.
The only trace of the successive construction phases remains in the different shades of gray: light for the original volume of the house and dark for the external skin that enlarges it.
Courtyard
In a formal clarification, the small courtyard is transformed into a perfectly square walled courtyard.
A high white wall embraces the façade of the house in a C-shape, interrupted only by the identical access and garage gates, which, like theatrical backdrops, are aligned along the driveway.
Made of white-painted L-shaped steel frames supporting solid wood planks with a natural finish, they are composed by a pedestrian door and a second larger door gate which, when opened together, reach the width of the driveway. While it’s true that 99% of gates built around the world are stark representations of the “end of public space” and the “beginning of private space.” Often intimidating in their aspect, they mostly speak the language of deterrence, this fence belongs to the 1% of gates that speak another language: welcoming guests, human warmth, and continuity between the city and the domestic space.
