“Effebi house” is the result of the refurbishment of a seventies flat located near Arezzo in Tuscany (Italy), made for a four people young family.
CREDITS:
architectural project – ARCHITETTURA MATASSONI (Architects Alessandro and Leonardo Matassoni)
images – ARCHITETTURA MATASSONI
structure – Engineer Alessandro Romei
NOTES:
surface – 106 square meters of net area
location – Arezzo province, Tuscany – ITALY
date of completion – february 2019
estimated cost/square meter – about 900,00 €/mq.
The client’s brief program included a whole living area composed by the entrance, the livingroom, the diningroom, the kitchen with a small storage and a night-area comprehensive of three bedrooms and twoo bathrooms.
Due to the common property of the perimeter walls, they couldn’t be modified and the architects have had to imagine this space as inside an untouchable box.
Despite the delicate existing structural masonry (protected by very strict rules to ensure the building against the earthquakes), the architects designed one whole and organic environment for the living-area, realising a wide opening in the main internal wall. To make the most of the resources, they also decided to use plasterboard panels for the mostly: a cheap material very adapt to make complex shapes. Indeed the purpose of the project was to create a very fluid space by using enveloping surfaces based on the idea, ispired by Lucio Fontana’s “spazialismo” concept, that spatial perception is like a riverberation of the currents created by shape inside a metaphorical armonic field.
So, every kind of architectural surface is like a sound box playing in a different way!
The resulting space had to be very dynamic and, as much as possible abstract, to avoid the feeling to be inside a traditional architectural box made by orthogonal surfaces. The architects wanted to create a surreal space. To achieve the goal they let rise the wood floorings on to the walls and the ceilings go down, creating the narrow cuts in which are settled the strips led for the lighting.
ABOUT OUR ATTITUDE:
Modern architecture is above all a freedom conquer!
Freedom from mechanical life-style inherited by our cultural evolution, from the analytical reasoning that industrilized our lifes, and freedom from the alienation and fragmentetion of our time and space.
So, how to be faithful to these high principles working inside a simple architectural box?
In other words, as architects, how to be respectful to our duty to create poetry despite the heaviness of the prosaic daily-life constraints? Physical limits, money, client’s will.
We think the answer could be a space that could comunicate on a deep level of perception; following the Edward Wilson’s ideas about human evolution, it should be an environment capable to call to memory the feeling of a psychologically comfortable natural space, like something primitive we already have inside our self, like an heritage older than every cultural superstructure we built.
So we focused on those fundamental human needs concerning the “ ancestral shelter”; this means an essential architecture and a space, devoiding of sophistications. An artificial fluid micro-landscape suitable for living innately.
