INTERIOR 19
Designed for the permanence and habits of a single person, the small apartment is part of the “twentieth-century expansion of the city with a defined typology and high settlement density” according to the current PRG. The Interior 19 is located in that portion of the urban pattern of tall multi-storey buildings with continuous fronts and ground floors dedicated to commercial activities. Here the city is an austere place and, as the PRG itself states, “the road structure, collective facilities and public spaces are undersized compared to building densities”.
The super condominium of Interior 19 is a building from the late 1960s covered in brick and characterized by interior spaces finished in marble and wood.
The typical apartment is about eighty square meters: the entrance and “L”-shaped hallway serve the individual rooms, among which the kitchen is diametrically opposite to the living area. The original finishes of the apartment are the wallpapers, painted plasters and floors of various types, the most valuable of which are in graniglia marble.
The Interior 19 project born from the need to re-establish a hierarchy between the different rooms of the house, dealing with the present shafts in the condominium and preserving the only valuable finish, namely the marble of the flooring in the bed area and living room. Three other materials are added to the existing graniglia: the birch wood, the concrete and the Carrara marble.
The wooden curvature of the entrance, a lowered space like the other service areas (bathroom, dressing room, storage room, walk-in closet), is the planimetric sign that directs towards the main room of the house.
The continuity of the only longitudinal space, which holds the kitchen and living room, is contradicted by the floor finishes and the wooden and Carrara marble portal. The latter, incorporating an existing pillar and beam, generates a lowering of the kitchen.
The line that separates the walking surfaces between the living room-kitchen and the serving-bedroom spaces is the sign that divides the apartment into two exact portions: on the one hand the memory of the existent, on the other the abstract concrete carpet from which the new birch wood walls emerge.
