Porta San Biagio Apartment
Location: Monza, Italy
Year: 2024
Architects: cntextual
Photography by: Francesca Iovene
Urban Role
The intervention is places inside a courtyard building dating back to the late nineteenth/early twentieth century along the built border demarcating the urban center of the city of Monza.
Historically, the area was occupied by the city walls and one of the access gates to the city: Porta San Biagio.
Following its demolition in 1845, the walls and moat left room for residential blocks that, following its path, inhabit its thickness.
Therefore, at an urban level, the building that hosts the intervention takes on the role once played by the Gate: mediation between an internal and an external dimension and, above all, physical identification of the passage between the two.
Threshold
The project reads this condition, bringing the urban character of the building to the domestic scale through the identification of a tool for spatial definition and regulation: the threshold.
To this end, the intervention is generated by a careful analysis of the current state and the consequent understanding of its potential, with the aim of defining the necessary interventions for their expression.
As found
The project operates within a large two-room apartment spatially defined by the sequence of three structural spans, in load-bearing masonry.
The first one, just past the entrance, is tripartite, hosting a bathroom, a kitchen and a hallway/entrance “hall”.
To the East, in the second one, a corridor culminating in a closet gives access to the main bedroom, while to the west the living area finds its place.
Oriented to the south/east, the housing unit has large openings on the main front, being parallel to the access banister, while a false ceiling extending over the entire surface of the property hides a wooden beam ceiling and an internal height of approximately 3.30m.
Yellow,red,blue
From the analysis of the existing a categorization of the design takes place, basing itself on the typical codes of a reuse intervention*, which are followed by a further design phase, linked to the future potential of the artifact:
- demolitions/yellow: removal of the superfluous
- constructions/red: addition of the necessary
- preparations/blue: anticipation of possible future needs
Demolitions
The first design action involved, therefore, the removal of the false ceiling and the restoration of the wooden beams to recall the character of the existing factory.
The second involved the demolition of the bathroom and the kitchen with the aim of restoring the spatial perception of the structural spans and optimizing the internal distribution.
Finally, the third, the doubling of the openings inside the wall partitions, allows continuous flows inside the apartment
The constructions were limited to the rationalization of the distribution according to the principles of miniaturization and internal transposition of the urban conditions of the building, through the spatial device of the threshold.
Additions
In concrete terms, this found a form in the definition of a closet border that, extending longitudinally along the entire dimension of the wall adjoining the courtyard, increases its thickness, enhancing the physical and conceptual distance between inside and outside and distributing the house’s rooms with the related systems layouts.
In the central and western spans, the spine, touching the wall, defines respectively the servant spaces of the living room and the kitchen columns.
In the eastern span, instead, detaching itself from the wall, it builds the inhabited thickness of the bathroom (towards the courtyard) and the wardrobe of the adjacent bedroom (facing the street).
Preparations
The new location of the bathroom and the kitchen allows for a free articulation of the spaces, providing for the possibility of transforming the dining area into an additional single bedroom by inserting a simple partition wall, traces of which are made visible in the rhythmic division of the closet border, currently used as a studiolo.
Building the threshold
At the entrance, the continuity of the wardrobes finds a moment of interruption, showing its thickness and the tension in the relationship with the existing masonry, defining a space of mediation between a collective external condition (courtyard + balcony) and an internal, private one (the home).
To this end, the volumetric compression of this place contributes. Reducing its height to 2.10 m by means of a grid ceiling, it makes the passage between the spatiality of the courtyard and that of the inhabited spaces perceptible. Finally, inside this “ in-between space”, the light plays a fundamental role. Permeating from the existing fanlight, it is directed and filtered until raining zenithally from the grid of the ceiling, defining a third light condition, specific to the threshold, necessary to structure the passage between two different realities.
Language
The rationalization of the spaces from a planimetric point of view corresponds to a warm and domestic language defined by the wooden tones of the existing beams, canaletto walnut essence closets and the oak of the floors, whose laying finds moments of variation in correspondence with the main openings and passageways.
Lastly, the latter, real thresholds in between the different domestic environments, are characterized by the presence of sliding pocket doors designed to guarantee an either fluid or concluded spatiality as needed, exploiting the technical thickness of the same as a joint between the existing and the new construction. Text description by the architects Text description by the architects.
Source: www.cntextual.it
Team: arch. Nicolò Mariani + arch. Christian Spolti
Structure: Studio Ingegneria Lambro
Contractor: Locatelli Costruzioni srl
Custom-made furniture: Arredo90 snc
Flooring / finishes: Casiraghi parquet srl
