A “dual” house in Padua

In a lot with a narrow and elongated morphology, bordered to the north by a neighbourhood of buildings of no particular quality and facing south onto the Paduan countryside, the project by depaolidefranceschibaldan architects enhances the area and gives new life to an insipid rural building from the 1960s. The project consists of recovering the existing building, restoring its brick walls and tiled roofs in keeping with the building’s original typological features, and constructing new buildings to meet the client’s living requirements: a two-storey building to the north, adjacent to the historic building, containing sleeping quarters and services; the other single-storey building, located in the garden to the south, containing the kitchen and living area. A glazed gallery connects the two buildings and forms an uninterrupted visual axis from the entrance towards the park and the surrounding landscape.

The composition is inspired by a “dichotomous” logic, following an ideal process of rarefaction of architecture from the urbanised neighbourhood towards the countryside: just as the house is austere and impenetrable on the public access front, so it is airy and rarefied in its more intimate and private spaces, immersed in the greenery. The north façade is composite and compact, and is characterised by the juxtaposition of the brick building pierced only by thin vertical slits, and the new volume, slightly set back and with a single opening, in exposed concrete and wood slat cladding. Continuing inside the area, the massive forms of the entrance façade give way to the translucent surfaces of the gallery, where a large wooden bookcase is located, and of the living room, where fully openable glass walls to the south and north create a continuous perceptual and fruitive relationship between architecture and nature.

A dual approach is also pursued in the relationship between exteriors and interiors: in the exteriors, the rigorous and rough exposed concrete volumes with traces of formwork and rough wood cladding evoke a Brutalist language; in the interiors, the bright rooms with white lime walls, exposed smoothed concrete floors, light-coloured birch wood furniture and fixtures evoke an essential and ethereal atmosphere.