The new building in viale Monte Grappa 16 in Milan by Luca Aureggi and Maurizio Condoluci, founders of Westway Architects, has been completed. The façade with three horizontal bands - rusticated concrete, plastered masonry and double skin glass – shows just how rigorous and at the same time innovative the redevelopment of the building in Milan has been.
“In this project” explains architect Maurizio Condoluci “we have transformed the existing constraints into design tools. The alignment in height with the adjacent buildings has allowed us to achieve the glazed crowning with double skin on two floors emphasized by the large stone frame. This is the element that breaks the rigour of the nineteenth century façade and declares the contemporary nature of the work, used for all aspects of the design: internal distribution, structural characteristics, materials, housing standards, high energy performance up to the mixed-use (commercial/residential).”
In total, the building consists of two underground floors used as a garage, the ground floor for commercial use and buildings from four to six storeys high for residential use, for a total of 25 apartments of different size and type (simplex, duplex and triplex), all with its own balcony or terrace, with some plants and facing towards the internal courtyard.
The courtyard is a central distribution area of the commercial spaces and of the vertical connections, but also a meeting and resting place for the presence of two large trees that “emerge” from the ellipses in the roof.
All the apartments are distributed around the courtyard, accessible from the walkways and recovered from the nineteenth century layout, which are no longer public but private (with gateway) and usable as liveable outdoor spaces.
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