Milan, Italy
Giacomo De Amicis of deamicisarchitetti creates a contemporary residential building in the center of Milan by restoring a preexisting building, maintaining older structural elements, and adding contemporary features.
To intervene on a building facing the street raised a question on whether to act through its replacement or through reconstruction and volumetric integration.
The project has been awarded a 2021 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
Choosing the latter answers two complementary instances: on the one hand to avoid a complete demolition and reconstruction and on the other the desire to preserve the memory of the pre-existing building as part of the urban scene.
The choice to merge the old and the new is part of a more general conviction for which it is believed that rewriting the history of a building by modifying it and transforming it is often more interesting than its annulment and replacement, as has become evident, even on an urban scale.
Where the preservation of parts of pre-existing buildings is not in open contrast with programmatic requirements, the presence of signs of time is in fact recognized as an intrinsic quality in the mutual relationship between new and already settled urban and semantic relations.
The first and second floors were therefore maintained in their original forms, while the ground floor and, of course, the additional crowning plan were completely redesigned.
The pre-existing complex organized according to the most typical typological canons of the Milanese popular architecture and composed of two L-shaped buildings with a gallery distribution, plus a third lower body for craft use, had its fulcrum in the court that they define.
The project, in order not to alter the proportions of the interior spaces despite the increase in the volume on the margins, has planned to raise the proportion of the courtyard itself so as to restore the relationship between full and empty spaces and at the same time allow the realization of the underground garages without resorting to excavations below the share of the foundations.
The other relevant aspect concerns the proposed distribution system.
It provides for the construction of a new branched gallery on the three buildings, which allows access to all the housing units starting from a single staircase body and a single elevator.
Its articulation is strongly evocative of the traditional gallery system in its forms, without however generating significant easement.
The apartments (16 in total) are differentiated not only by their size, but also by their type and internal space (simplex, duplex, and loft).
The roofs are modeled and articulated according to the dual purpose of giving unity to the intervention and allowing the greatest possible penetration of light into the court.
The roof of the body facing the road has a section that allows the positioning of solar and photovoltaic panels in an invisible position, and at the same time to obtain significant heights inward correspondence with the windows, with a significant increase in brightness.
This geometric artifact balances the reduced heights of the rooms imposed by the law on the recovery of attics.
Project: Residenze Canonica
Architects: deamicisarchitetti
Client: Nava
General Contractor: Bailo srl.
Photographer: Alberto Strada
