A BLACK MACASSAR DIVIDER (LEFT) AND TACCHINI’S ‘JULEP’ SOFA (RIGHT) AT THE MILAN HOME OF FRANCESCO LIBRIZZI, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF FONTANAARTE,
Dividers rule in architect Francesco Librizzi’s free-flowing Milanese apartment
The key to understanding Francesco Librizzi and, indeed, his new apartment on Milan’s via Mauro Macchi, is how he looks at space. For starters, it is so easy, he points out, to separate one room from another with walls and doors. ‘But how do you let a space and, therefore its users, flow without interruption, while still feeling the specificity of different functions, such as dining and work zones?’
For the Palermo-born architect, and artistic director of design label Fontanaarte, any attempt to restrict movement, much less dictate how a space should be used, is forbidden. ‘I like to unlock spaces and create endless circulation. Working, interacting, cooking are not always distinct moments in time and space,’ he explains. ‘You need to allow a space to change. You have to create freedom, which means accepting that the»
inhabitants will use a space in ways they have not yet imagined and of which the designer cannot conceive.’
These touchstones, already firmly embedded in Librizzi’s 15-year-old architectural practice (which works on everything from buildings to exhibition and product design), took on greater importance for him this year when, as he was in the midst of renovating his new apartment, Italy retreated into its Covid-19 lockdown. The experience, along with his inability to work on the renovation for three months, only amplified his approach to space, its multifunctionality, and its relationship to the human psyche.
Set in an eight-storey corner pile, built in 1957 in a late Italian modernist-style, the pentagonal fourth-floor apartment had interesting bones, not least a balcony fronting each of the principal rooms. But what sealed the deal for Librizzi were the views of the Pirelli Tower and Palazzo Montedoria, both of which were created by his design hero, Gio Ponti. In Milan, he says, ‘you just don’t come across this kind of view’.
The Ponti buildings became integral to Librizzi’s reworking of the apartment’s 130 sq m interiors. With literally five walls and numerous corners, finding a perspective that was not oriented towards any particular point was a challenge. The solution came when he realised that the apartment, with its five balconies and views, is really a big urban loggia in which a private porch is projected into a public space.
‘An apartment conceived as a small square that’s open to the city can interact with the materials of the buildings it faces, including the street and the trees,’ says Librizzi. ‘In this way, a private life becomes less relevant. What Covid-19 has taught us is that the quality of our relationships with one another and with the exterior environment has become more important.’
Once Librizzi embraced this paradigm shift – the conceit of drawing the city into the apartment and the apartment out to the city – the rest of the puzzle fell quickly into place.
He demolished the walls of two bedrooms to create an internal agora of kitchen, living room and study. ‘I wanted to break the traditional hierarchy of rooms,’ he says. Sticking to the idea that spaces should allow circulation without defined points of entry and exit, Librizzi installed two slender ceiling-height screens.»
‘I like to unlock spaces and create endless circulation. Working, interacting, cooking are not always distinct moments’
One is sheathed in black macassar – an homage to the partition wall in Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in the Czech Republic – which, in turn, anchors the white-tiled ‘Quaderna’ dining table by Superstudio for Zanotta.
At the other end of the space, behind a hemispheric ‘Julep’ couch designed by Jonas Wagell for Tacchini, stands a shimmering panel wall, clad in the same green clinker tiles that Gio Ponti designed and used for the façade of his Palazzo Montedoria across the road. In a stroke of luck, Librizzi was able to buy up the last batch of tiles that Teamwork, a bespoke tile maker based in Reggio Emilia, had reproduced when the palazzo was renovated in 2012.
It’s a dazzling sleight of hand in which the green screen faces the Ponti building that inspired it. ‘I’m sure from that building you can see this screen,’ Librizzi says. ‘It creates a visual short circuit.’ The effect of looping perception is unexpectedly moving. Is it any surprise to learn that the architect references Interstellar and Inception, both films in which the physical, emotional and spiritual qualities of humanity are transformed by bending the physical dimension?
This preoccupation with architectural metaphysics runs through the apartment. The concrete floor, for instance, is embedded with shards of mismatched marble and stone, their patterns forming hypnotic abstracts and metaphoric rugs. The kitchen’s mirrored splashback reflects a portion of the study hidden behind the macassar panel. In turn, the study leads into the bedrooms tucked away behind a long spine of aluminium frames, and in a full-circle moment, the ensuite bathroom opens into the kitchen.
One gets the sense that working on his apartment has been a meditative act in which Librizzi has tried to make sense of a space in a post-covid-19 world where we are increasingly forced to turn inwards. ‘The main goal of every designer is to design something that’s bigger than ourselves,’ he says. With his Milan apartment, he may well have achieved that goal with room to spare. * francescolibrizzi.com