Italian Archiplan Studio has recently refurbished a small apartment for tourist use in the historical centre of Mantua. The apartment belongs to a long design research path, which emerges in various interventions on built heritage.
“Basically, we try to keep together two worlds, the one of the old and the one of the new, in a balanceable to guarantee the identity of both of them” explains the architects.
Light and shadow are kept together in their ambiguity and plurality, without sacrificing the reasons of one at the expense of the other. In particular, the project emphasizes the differences and the heterogeneities of single spaces, in which ambiguity and contradiction prevail on the stylistic unitarity.
In this way, the precision of the design element is able to emerge, besides the imperfection of the material element to which the action of time gave a singular energy.
The furniture elements, all designed, define themselves as object cantankerous on one side and refined on the other, a sort of bestiary, and institute hybrid relationships with single spaces in which they are placed. The signs left by time, human work and aesthetic intention of different ages remain, while new signs overlap each other in a complexity which does not cancel the other knowledge.
Beauty can be found everywhere and does not belong to the intrinsic value of the material. It emerges in fragments overall, in evocative forms and their relationships.
“I believe that relationships represent the most important theme of our design path,” says Archiplan Studio. “Our favorite relationships try to keep together the opposites, as force and fragility, perfect and imperfect, the gloss of a newly crafted product and the unpredictability of materials fell in abandonment. Every project represents a route and a synthesis attempt for open and evolving questions.”
all images © Davide Galli Atelier