One of the architect’s core challenges is to reassert their role as a process manager. In this project, professional expertise is expressed specifically through the development of details that engage Space, react to context, and simultaneously simplify construction processes to reduce costs. Cost reduction was the central challenge: to demonstrate that the architect, through knowledge and invention, can lower expenses by devising constructive details. This approach enables the creation of contemporary living spaces at prices far below market averages, which too often sacrifice quality on the altar of speculation. Living is therefore the project’s purpose: to inhabit quality space without that quality being contingent on an elitist economic condition.
Regeneration and Material Reuse
Here, a forgotten place is brought back to life through the reuse of the plot and volumes abandoned to ruin, and through the use of genuinely recycled materials—sometimes salvaged from other contexts and returned to a new life cycle. Even an artistic installation (“Superbonus” for LOG Magazine, 2022, Dropcity, Salone del Mobile Milano, by SuperVoids) can be dismantled, rethought, and rescued from its natural end-of-life, to be reused as thermal insulation. In this virtuous process, panels recovered from landfill are transformed into window sills, acquiring dignity, while recycled plastic fibers are reprocessed to create an invented, reinforced screed floor.
Spatial Continuity and Transformation
Through a series of design strategies, space opens up, entering into continuity with the place, conveying the hope that a culture of building can restore real value to the word Space. This project—possible only thanks to the courage of a very young client, who dared to place trust and invest in the value of design—saw a garage and a former chicken coop connected and transformed into a house. The old volumes, situated on a riverbed, run narrow like an intestine, coil around themselves, and progressively transform. This change ensures a constant yet ever-shifting interaction with the environment. In such a narrow house, the exteriors come alive, continuously altering the perception of the interior spaces, which, thanks to the movement of the sun, are never the same.
Constructive Invention and Material Aging
Alien space becomes domestic; the given form adapts to a logic of progressive alteration, extending down to the constructive detail. The invention of the perimeter load-bearing walls examined a traditional construction technique based on a lost formwork made of two EPS panels. By unbalancing the insulation—increasing its mass toward the interior and decreasing it toward the exterior—it was possible to keep the thicker layer to guarantee the home’s thermal performance, while applying a release agent to the thinner side allowed that panel to be removed after casting and reused on the roof, revealing a fair-faced concrete wall. The reinforced concrete of the façade participates in this process and sense of mutation, of transfiguration of the place: the small ties that held the perimeter formwork are exposed to the river’s humidity and inevitably rust. The structure “weeps” rust, and its tears mark the material; Architecture lives, ages, and is enriched by experience. This detail realizes what might seem a futile decoration, but is in fact a dynamic awareness of the site, achieved through the reinterpretation of a banal construction technique, reinvented thanks to chemical reaction and an understanding of a characteristic inherent to the place.
Belonging Through Dialogue
Belonging to the place flourishes through the active dialogue between context and the matter of building, and it is the interaction of the human being with their life that both grasps and generates its value.
