Contrasto tra spazio e natura

On the top floors of a very distinguished 1930s Milanese building, Icona Architetti Associati designed an incredible duplex by recovering the attics of the bâtiment: a residential project capable of creating a new space where there was none before.   A young couple had been looking for a retreat in downtown Milan for some time, expressing the idea of living inside a historic building. At that very moment, Icona Architetti Associati was refurbishing a twentieth-century apartment building, whose style perfectly matched the clients' wishes. The opportunity became concrete when they sensed the possibility of obtaining, from the generous height of the attics under renovation, an additional level through a slight lowering of the attic sill. This solution allowed not only to recover and make habitable the whole area of the attics, but also to generate an additional floor, imagining a comfortable duplex apartment with a penthouse area and a super-attic. This is how this project na-sce: by extracting a space that was not there from nowhere. The access level of the residence, located on the fourth floor, appeared as an almost completely blank sheet, with the binding exception of an L-shaped load-bearing wall, placed more or less in the center of the volume. As is often the case, Icona was able to pivot on that one structural constraint, exploiting its design potential-as in a judo action-and turning it into one of the fulcrums of the entire design operation. The project concept is structured around three main architectural solutions, to which a fundamental principle of style should be added. The architectural concepts are: the great fluidity of dynamic and convivial spaces the dematerialization of the threshold between interior and exterior the definition of the stair-sculpture as the pivot around which the vertical axis is developed. All this is accompanied by a very precise formal choice: that of experimenting and using on each occasion the combination of two different elements. The idea of the binature: of two materials, of two colors, of two different and in some cases opposite forms but put in symbiosis and in balance, is an exercise of style developed around the metaphor of the pair, of the couple, of the conjunction that is worth more than the sum of the individuals.