ACADEMIA Letters
“From the Inside”: A Interior Design Studio Process
Imma ForinoFrancesca Rapisarda
In addition to works or monumental complexes, Italy’s urban heritage is characterised by a minute and dense fabric, which includes buildings of varying architectural and historical qual-ity. While those protected by the Soprintendenze (Monuments and Fine Arts Office) require measured restoration and adaptation work, non- protected buildings can be dealt with more freely, while respecting the building regulations established by the various municipalities. And yet these “minor” buildings, even more than the monuments, identify a constant dialogue with the past: the Italian architectural culture of stratification is not only given by the coexis-tence of old and new works, one next to the other but also of parts built in successive periods in the same factory, according to an accumulation of different qualities, signs and materials, which characterises the final result as never really definitive. The necessity of change has subjected, and continues to subject, what was there: extensions, rebuilding, destruction and incorporation create a super stylistic unity over time, modifying the spatial distribution and adapting the uses to which it is put. It is a metahistorical continuum, often arbitrary, which, by stripping, aggregating and constructing, rectifies the previous elements in an attempt to relate them to the contemporary world: the transformation of the whole guarantees its use and sur-vival over time, even in the frequent deprivation of original features: “The existing —Vittorio Gregotti specified concerning modification— has become heritage: beyond the passivity of the notion of reuse, every architectural operation is increasingly an act of partial transforma-tion.” (Gregotti 1984, 4). Intervention on these buildings is, moreover, the most frequent design opportunity for architects working in the national context, mostly catalogued under the uncertain term of “interior renovation,” a term which, while easily emblematising what is done or transformed in architectural interiors, both historical and of current construction, lacks any real theorisation.
Given this premise, the Interior Architecture Design Laboratory, located in the third year of the Degree Course in Architectural Design at the Politecnico di Milano, investigates the interiors of pre-existing, obsolete or abandoned architecture, reconverting them to contempo-rary uses. While respecting the pre-existence taken as a “constraint” (load-bearing structures and any decorative apparatus), the project themes relate to the transformation of spaces in the function of the production and display of contemporary art (case-studios and artists’ work-shops, private galleries, other exhibition venues) or the activation of new productive scenarios (co-working and start-ups), suggested by the particularly dynamic context of the Lombardy territory in both sectors.
In recent years the design themes have turned towards a strong social component, thanks to the positive interaction with some municipalities, associations or non-profit institutions, which have asked for the compositional advice of students belonging to the Laboratory, which has long since coagulated into a Research Group entitled Interior Reuse Lab.1 The
didac-tics, therefore, promotes design research “in the field” or Research by Design, which involves teachers, students and referees in close dialogue on the socio-cultural revival of structures that are now inadequate but perceived by local communities as precious traces of their past.2 The
research and project themes, therefore, vary not only concerning the types of buildings as-signed but also for the different social, cultural and economic contexts, providing new project experiences each time.
Beyond the differences in thought and action, the projects of the Laboratory on the exist-ing heritage enhance the interior space of the buildexist-ings accordexist-ing to values aimed at theoreti-cally defining the operational research. The architectural interior is assumed as an enclosure, adopting the binomial “envelope/enclosure” or the interpretative artifice of structuralist im-print defined by the critic Renato De Fusco (1973, 30, 37) concerning the historiographic reading of Architecture. The new interventions complete (from the Latin compleo, to fill, to fill in) the interior with new, legible structures, for which the definition of “building within the built” (transposing it from the consolidated urban fabric) or “interior within the interior” is often used (Forino 2001; Ead. 2017). In this case, the building is reduced to an envelope, in which the project can be inserted.
Others new spaces are generated: by summation, accumulation, addition according to a 1Since 2006, the authors have been jointly conducting the teaching and research experience of the Interior
Architecture Design Laboratory (Imma Forino, Interior Architecture-8 CFU; Francesca Rapisarda, Exhibition Design-4 CFU) at AUIC School, Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
2These are non-profit conventions between the DAStU Department of Architecture and Urban Studies
(Politec-nico di Milano) and municipalities or entities. For the a.y. 2018-19 the teaching experience is developed within the funded research “Polisocial” of Politecnico di Milano, title: MOST of Pioltello, coordinated by Prof. A. Di Giovanni, in agreement with the Municipality of Pioltello (MI).
thickening of meanings, which René Magritte well depicted in his art work L’importance des
meravilles (1927), placing a woman’s body inside another, these inside yet another and so
on, in a multiplication of marvels. Or else space is freed with a measured, almost subdued intervention: here the project deepens a unique narrative, re-appropriating the essence of ar-chitecture, that is, its emptiness. This is achieved through a process of subtraction, responding to the totality of the built environment by exalting its opposite: the reservoir is the true ma-terial of the project. The young designer’s task is to highlight the almost concrete quality of
cavum (from the Latin, cavity) as an intimate resistance, with which it has over time rejected
extraneous or extemporary pressures and tampering. It is a resistance that can be skillfully restored, as Gordon Matta-Clark represented in his interventions on constructed buildings (Office Baroque, 1977), enhancing the void as an absence not to be completed, recalling the
cavum + aedium from which the atrium of the Pompeian house derives (in Latin cavaedium),
before tetrastyle or Corinthian conformations distorted its substance as a luminous and airy space.
Concerning a historically stratified urban reality and to the many design opportunities it offers, and in line with the Italian culture of “spacing” —theoretically developed in the post-war period by Bruno Zevi, Giulio Carlo Argan, Luigi Moretti and others (Forino 2016, 149-50—, the use of the terminology of “Interior Reuse” was proposed for such Research by Design, as opposed to the more usual Adaptive Reuse: that is, a methodological category in its own right was identified —for interpretative research as well as for the fine-tuning of the project— for interventions that enhance the architectural envelope in particular. “Redesigning from the inside” is therefore taken as the guideline for the compositional exercise while, start-ing from the metamorphosis of the basin, the dialogue with the urban context is developed, with a methodological forcing that is effective in understanding the significant values of the interior space.
The specificity of the intervention on the interiors in the wider field of the project cul-ture is the original contribution that the young designers of the Laboratory provide in the re-actualisation of the pre-existences: “History is not at all unilinear and purely successive: it can be considered as a consideration of widely extended presents. (…) History is usually a conflict of precocity, actuality and delay,” writes Henri Focillon (1987, 87). In architecture, as much as history is rooted in the notion of environment, the variables involved in its be-coming are linked to collective needs: “Just as man, with his cultures, deforestation, canals, roads, modifies the face of the earth and creates a kind of geography all his own, so the ar-chitect produces new conditions for historical life, for social life, for the moral life. Art is the creator of unpredictable environments. It satisfies certain needs and propagates others. It invents a world” (Focillon 1987, 95). Working on past “worlds” —the interiors that have
marked the history of the city— is a development strategy for the heritage of the past, but also an expressive didactic method.
References
De Fusco, Renato 1973. Segni, storia e progetto dell’architettura. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Focillon, Henri 1987. Vita delle forme (1943). Trad. di S. Bettini e G. Guglielmi. Torino:
Einaudi.
Forino, Imma 2016. “Storie di libri (e di una ‘storia’ fatta di libri).” In B. Finessi, Stanze:
Altre filosofie dell’abitare, 144-59. Marsilio: Venezia.
—–. 2017. “The ‘interno nell’interno’: Some furnishings paradigms for an interior as inte-riority.” Palgrave Communication, no. 3: 17022. DOI: 10.1057/palcomns.2017.22. Gregotti, Vittorio 1984. “Modificazione.” Casabella, no. 498-499: 2-7.
Figures
Interior Architecture Design Studio, teachers: I. Forino and F. Rapisarda, AUIC School Politecnico di Milano, Migrant and needy reception centre, Italian Red Cross Verona (reuse
of former factory, 1902), students: M. Baggio, S. Marino, M. Mazzarisi, C. Savi, a.y. 2017-18.
Interior Architecture Design Studio, teachers: I. Forino and F. Rapisarda, AUIC School Politecnico di Milano, Cultural centre, Laveno Mombello VA (reuse of office building and annexes ex Società Ceramica Italiana, original project P. Portaluppi, 1924-26), students: S.
