INTERNATIONAL 2 STAGE IDEAS COMPETITION                   3rd Prize

the project applies a critical approach to the existing complex, going to remove all incongruous superfetations of the building, in the courtyard area to the west, that of the 19th-century industrial spaces related to the arms factory and barracks.

these spaces, which nevertheless have historical-architectural appeal, are not the complex constituent elements, and in a residence-oriented renovation they become difficult to divide and reuse.

in addition, the multi-story underground parking lot can only be built under the court, without operating on the foundations of the monumental courtyard. historical analysis shows that the western courtyard was the garden of the former college “somasco”.

the project re-proposes complex’s history, defining a garden in which to insert a new building that reuses the existing surfaces removed.

the residential block seeks insertion into the existing building plot, overlapping the different architectures of the surroundings through a mechanism of interference by continuity and inclusion.

the dialectic between innovation and tradition includes both the blatantly incongruous volumes on the top floor of the historic building and the new suspended residential courtyard.

It is almost a winter garden, an offshoot of the inner court, more private protected, where a series of structural walls supporting a “contemporary” residential court, juxaposed to the perimetral surrounding buildings, often built on the property line.