TIPOLOGY
Residential (renovation)
LOCATION
Milan (Italy)
AREA
36 sq. m. / 387 sq. ft.
DATE
July 2022
PHOTOGRAPHER
Stylist
Contributors
team
Lorenzo & Alessandro
Patrizio Mozzicafreddo
Architecture and Interior Design Studio in Milan
Ines’s oasis
This is the renovation of a small apartment in an area of Milan that is now the subject of major urban transformations, such as the Fondazione Prada by Studio OMA and the new Bocconi Campus by the studio SANAA.
We are in the southern part of the city, right next to the railway ring. Here, alongside the new icons of contemporary architecture, we can still see evidence of the tenements built for the working class in the early 1900s, which in Milan are called “case a ringhiera“: social housing built around a central courtyard, with side-by-side flats accessed from a shared, open balcony with a railing.
The wash hung out to dry, the lack of privacy of rooms opening onto the outdoor balconies, the now abandoned shared toilets – all suggest the strong current of social interactions that has always characterised this type of dwelling.
These long-forgotten forms of coexistence created microcosms where a deeply communitarian concept of living spaces prevailed, overshadowing the private sphere.
What remains of all that vital energy?
Much has changed, perhaps everything, and yet to this day, to live in this kind of house implies a desire for more permeable personal boundaries.
Surprisingly, our mind-set seems to be inclined to great porosity with respect to our idea of the home, and the neighbourhood dimension becomes an integral part of our domestic identity.
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After all, if the cat of the people next door keeps entering our home undisturbed, it is because this osmosis not only involves our peers, but also manages to emerge as a principle, overcoming all boundaries.
Besides, animals, too, have always been a part of our communities, and their painted image has appeared on our domestic walls since the dawn of time.
The idea of a domestic space projecting an aura of harmonious empathy over all beings may represent the exact intent of our utopias.
It is around the table that an interspecies community gathers to transform the convivial setting into a place of knowing, so that people, animals, and everything else all become the way to grasp the meaning of life. Food is no longer a mere product for consumption but has developed into that mysterious substance that nourishes us and of which we are a part.
Not far from this “family reunion”, a more abstract scenario takes shape; we wished to suggest the presence of a surrounding landscape that has reached its maximum synthesis: a sort of backdrop that could embrace everything, alluding to an infinite spatiality. We wanted the colours of the feathers, the clatter of the tableware, and the fragrance of clean laundry to be made into a perceptive experience, we had to deconstruct the visible … and, paradoxically, we wanted to represent all this in the smallest room.
Thus was born the idea of mounting a solo exhibition of Ellsworth Kelly’s work in the small bathroom: using ordinary, coloured tiles we were able to reproduce some works by the great master of American abstraction. Helped by the modular grid of the 10x10 cm tiles, we have reproposed his famous panels made of rhythm, colour, and joy, hoping that we, too, have managed to capture the ecstasy of seeing.
Architecture and Interior Design Studio in Milan
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