interior design building renovation • loft • milano • steel
Location_Milano
Year_2023
Area_90 sqm
Client_Private
Service_Preliminary project, executive project, building site direction
Milan, in its tirelessly change, has recently opened up to the regeneration of old basements.
In place of dark warehouses and depots, new spaces are created for offices, showrooms and laboratories, sometimes even homes.
This project concerns the transformation of the warehouse of a skirting board and baseboard shop, still existing in the area, into a personal office for a university professor. The context is rather monumental: an elegant building in Porta Venezia district, where even a basement can be appreciated for its large barrel vault in exposed brick.
Prologue
The first impression, whether concerns people or places, is always indelible.
Therefore, there are no compromises when it comes to entrance doors, otherwise the entire project starts off on the wrong foot.
After descending the ancient ramp in sass de risada, a single-pane glass door opens inwards, breaking down the boundaries between inside and outside. Built with thin steel profiles, in homogeneity with the other restored iron windows, it has a spectacular pivoting opening. Pivot doors are a fetishistic obsession of architects. They do not have a particular better functionality than classic hinged doors, but their aristocratic slow movement is pure poetry. The handle was custom-designed and made specifically by the blacksmith starting from simple 20 x 20 mm steel tubes bent by force. Like a wide handlebar, it allows the heavy frame to be moved easily. Door handles, often the only things we touch in a building, provide a tactile experience. For this renovation, we wanted the sensation of gripping the door handle to be something special. The subtle tension that runs through it when you push the heavy door frame like a lever is destined to remain imprinted in the muscle memory of whoever uses it. Whether it resembles the horns of a bull or the handlebars of a Harley Davidson, the door handle is in any case a singular object: the first thing you come across and that strikes the tone of the entire project.
Four grafts
The project strategy arises from the recognition that the as-built situation has its own harmonious spatiality and historical value to preserve. Thus the architectural interventions are punctual: no new walls or partitions, but a coordination of grafted objects. Each graft born to create material and formal contrast between old and new, allowing the reading of stratifications occurred over time. This should be the basis of every intervention on beautiful existing architecture, regardless it has a high historiographical value protected by law or not.
Graft 1_Bookshelf
A peculiar characteristic of the former warehouse was the arrangment on two levels divided by a drop of about 70 cm, such as to make a staircase and a balustrade necessary.
The latter, however, is ideally extruded on the horizontal plane for half a meter and given its primary function, it also becomes a double facing bookshelf. Made of waxed natural steel, the bookcase becomes a multiplier of brightness. An useful detail inside basement characterized by low influx of natural light.
Graft 2_Staircase
For the staircase, we relied on an “autopsy finding” uncovered in the premises, under a blanket of dust: three enormous balcony slabs made of stone. Observing the French balconies on the first floor of the condominium courtyard, it is clear that during construction it was decided to build balconies only from the second floor up and therefore these slabs were stored in the warehouse. Reuse is always a good practice, even if it occurs after 120 years, so these slabs were cut to make steps, almost identical to the famous ones of the Milan Red Line Subway, whose stop is only a few steps away.
Graft 3_Bathroom
The insertion of a small bathroom is resolved with the purity of a primary form, a cylinder, free on all sides, whose door remains defiled, virtually creating an anteroom. Thanks to the raw iron skin, fixed, as a naval technique, with rivets, there is no confusion between the early twentieth century context and the new grafted element. Inside the cylinder, the circularity multiplies in thousands waves, thanks to a particular ceramic relief tile (Quintessenza, Marea). Hypnotic patterns of light recall the ceramic band decoration, thus reinterpreting a classic of the bathroom environment, which here becomes an impalpable memory, being destined to disappear when the ceiling spotlights are turned off.
Nothing in the accessories deviates from the rounded archetype: the ceramic sink is a cylinder with hidden fixing and the spout, a long stainless steel cylinder, descends from the ceiling. Like rain, water comes from above.
Graft 4_Kitchen
At the backdrop wall of the space there is a kitchen. Monolithic and laconic. A “background” kitchen, suitable for a totally open-space office. It is located in a wall niche created on pourpose around a series of pipe-covering drywall boxes and storage rooms, that have cleaned up the backdrop wall of the space which, before the intervention, was congested by dozens of passing pipes and irregular wall elements.
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