House BRSL

We can enter just for a short period of time in the life of a building with secular origins: our intervention, our gestures are added to those of our predecessors, in a stratification of signs that hide or show depending on the historical period. Our aim is to deliver a snapshot, a true image of what we have done. All new and old materials in the building are left exposed, cement, iron, bricks, stone, beams and boards. Everything joins and composes out of necessity. this is an ancient building with a complex history: born as a dwelling, transformed over time into a laboratory for the production of hooves, then destined to shop, returns now to be the house for a young family. The mending intervention between the two blocks of which the overall unit is formed is particularly delicate, due to the extremely variable heights between the floors to be reconnected: the new steel staircase had to be the slightest possible to allow an uninterrupted perception of the spaces and light, becoming the fulcrum of the project and following the entire unfolding of life inside the house. In the restoration phase, the supporting structure, a brick and wooden floor weaving, is laid bare. The interventions are revealed as "overlapping necessities", and this is how some of the oldest parts of the house come to light: a masonry of stones and bricks, and also a huge warped chestnut beam that supported the base of the main building. To maintain the inter-floor heights, reinforced slabs with synthetic fibers have been added to the existing floorboards, adding only a few millimeters of resin. This involves a constructive complexity about the edges of the staircase, forcing already in the casting phase to lead back a raw material like concrete to the precision of the finished floor. The static of the building, heavily remodeled over the centuries, has been reconstructed by inserting concrete partitions and vertical tie rods with the aim of saving the building from sismic events. Even the roof has been reinforced: new metal profiles placed above the existing beams and connected through metal strips save its original beauty. In the twentieth century part of the house two large windows overlook the private garden. The detail of the glass glued on the wooden window allows a perfect coplanarity between the wall and the glass, making the boundaries almost disappear in a visual and emotional permeability: from the inside, getting closer to the edges, one has the feeling of being outdoors, "You can stay in the rain or watch the storm surge without getting wet".