Some houses respond to needs. Others anticipate them.
Casa CM, designed by michielizanatta and MAdeMA, belongs to the second category: not simply a home, but a domestic system conceived to evolve over time, accompanying the changes in the lives of those who inhabit it. The project — demolition and reconstruction with extension of a single-family house within the urban fabric of Udine — is a complete rewriting of domestic space. The goal was not to replace a volume, but to redefine the conditions of contemporary living: new relationships between spaces, new possibilities of use, a spatial hierarchy built around daily life and not the other way around.
A house articulated by moments The project unfolds across multiple levels, each calibrated to different rhythms of the day. The basement holds the most intimate and private dimension: a home theatre and gym, a sheltered space that extends living beyond the visible surface of the house. The ground floor is the heart of collective life: living room and study open toward the extension, where kitchen and dining area find their place in direct continuity with the private garden — not a backdrop, but a habitable extension of the interior. On the upper floor, the quieter sleeping area is completed by a generous terrace: a place of pause and dialogue with the urban landscape.
Architecture and interiors as a single gesture MAdeMA's contribution is not a subsequent intervention: it is a structural part of the design vision from the outset. Materials, colours, furnishings and atmosphere are conceived in continuity with the architecture, producing a coherent experience in which the interiors do not complete the space but define its sensory character.
A dialogue with Gino Valle The project carries an explicit reference to Friulian architectural culture. The main volume — warm, material, rooted — recalls Gino Valle's Casa Manzano; the suspended concrete extension responds instead to the sculptural language of the Monument to the Resistance. Two distinct elements that build a calibrated tension between memory and contemporaneity, between belonging to a place and an open gaze.
A space that changes over time Casa CM is an adaptive organism. The spaces are not conceived to be immutable: they can change function, absorb new needs, evolve alongside their inhabitants. Architecture as an open process — not as a definitive form. The result is a house in which intimacy and sharing, matter and light, inside and outside find a dynamic equilibrium. Not a container. An experience.
Living as experience Casa CM is part of a broader research that sees architecture as a tool for improving the quality of everyday life. Space is not considered neutral, but capable of influencing perceptions, relationships and wellbeing. The house becomes a place where intimacy and sharing, matter and light, inside and outside find a dynamic equilibrium. Not a container, but an experience. A project that demonstrates how even the domestic scale can become a ground for experimentation, capable of producing new visions of living and of restoring to architecture its deepest role: giving form to life.
