The Delight of Invention
In a block of flats in Milan dating from the 1940s, the home of the architect Lazzaro Raboni creates a flexible but measured interplay of shapes, forms and materials. It is a place that links up to the work of some of the most important exponents of the Milanese school, such as Umberto Riva, Luigi Caccia Dominioni and Vittoriano Viganò
“I’M NOT A DOGMATIST,” declares Lazzaro Raboni, talking about the home he has designed for himself. Which is like saying, in Umberto Riva’s words, “I have no certainties, so I proceed by phases.” Riva is an architect Raboni has known since childhood, but more for biographical rather than architectural reasons. But in the ends (or rather: first) everything is under control in this plan. It is a plan carried out with careful attention to structural rhythms and cadences and then adjusted with necessary “anomalies”, deviations and diagonal connections, and apparently accidental episodes that shape the space, the light and the pathways. So Raboni is no dogmatist, but he is a “piantista” (a plan specialist) to borrow the Milanese architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni’s famous description of himself. Thus we need to look at the plan first, and it is interesting to do so after the extraordinary spatial “grandeur” (described in Abitare no. 573) of the Russian clientele with whom Raboni has had the pleasure of dealing for some time now. In comparison, and in a quite different test of his expertise, more fine-grained stratagems that are needed here. The plan hinges on a central boomerang-shaped island, a core of services already perceptible from the entrance, which marks
WE NEED TO LOOK AT THE PLAN FIRST, TALKING ABOUT THIS HOUSE
out all the living areas – the dining zone, and the lounge stretching from one side of the flat to the other study area – in a succession of interconnected spaces that enriches the sense of movement with an uninterrupted and fluid circle around the perimeter and then draws the kitchen with it into a circuit in the form of a butterfly. There is, here, a clearly Kahnian logic of service and served spaces that makes the most of vistas and sequences, and this is further underlined by the details – of structure, of furnishing, of finish – that allude subtly to one another. Like the “boomerang” (whose polished outline flexes diagonally to brush against a window, bringing light inside the flat) that converses with the iron shelves in the entrance supported by a brass rod; or the long stone shelf running between the dining area and the kitchen, as well as the invention of a cut in the leaf of the folding door to accommodate it. There is also a long set of suspended bookshelves that unite the spaces of the double living area and leave the space underneath free, while a piece of black furniture divides those same areas, but only slightly. There are the doors, shutters
A KAHNIAN LOGIC OF SERVICE AND SERVED SPACES THAT MAKES THE MOST OF VISTAS AND SEQUENCES
and sliding panels rendered uniform by the use of tuliptree wood, “greyed” to lighten its presence while maintaining its warmth. And finally there is the recurrent black of the iron frames of the openings and exposed girders that frame the spaces, and that support the lowered airy slabs that mark the passages from one room to the next but, like movable signs, do not interrupt the continuity of the ceilings (something which is also achieved through the use of glass transom windows). And in this there is a touch linked to Raboni’s beloved Vittoriano Viganò ( from his apartment in Milan of 1957-58, for example), ass well as Riva and his references to the Le Corbusian casiers of the attic on Via Paravia (1967), and other recurrent traces like the diagonals, which are softened here, or amended to create trapezia (as in the walk-in wardrobe in the bedroom) and again in relation to the light and an ergonomics of space: poised between a sense of unity and fragmentation, between Brutalist propensity, digressions of language and delight in invented detail. ○
AN ERGONOMICS OF SPACE: POISED BETWEEN A SENSE OF UNITY AND FRAGMENTATION