House RG

Enrico Scaramellini’s project is a recovery of the attic of a portion of an apartment building made up of two blocks and a connecting body. The two blocks look differently even though they were both built in the 60s.

The portion affected by the intervention used to be inhabited by the families working on the ground floor grocer’s.

The existing block has a complex plan, due to the building within a narrow area. Folds, bevels and narrowings are a consequence of the narrow distances, indeed they were not designed for creative or architectural reasons. While the main building is a separate one and is standing on a flat terrain, the renovated block is just before the climbing street. The building has a compound shape. It broadens up northwards and has a straight side while and westwards it has a series of folds and bevelled edges.

The main point of the project was the restructuring of the pitched roof and its slope.

The solution proposed by Enrico Scaramellini was the rotation of the hipped roof (north/south). In order to have windows southwards the hipped roof was rotated so that the whole building gains a proportioned and contained shape. Its layout was furtherly refined thanks to the insertion of a chimney They first proceeded by redefining and regularising the volume, trying to find a balance despite the original irregural shape. Just a tiny intervention and the result is a new balance in shape and volume. The muddy colours of the wood and of the surrounding context influenced our choice of the materials in order to give the building some compactness. That’s why the architects chose thin kerlite tiles. The muddy colours and the tile covering strenghten the compactness of the building.

House RG, Madesimo, Italy
Program: refurbishment
Architects: ES-arch – Enrico Scaramellini Architetto
Project Team: Luca Trussoni e Francesco Manzoni
Furnishings e Construction site supervision: Giancarlo Rigamonti
Completion: 2013