Residential and Commercial Building

By Francesco Pagliari - 8 January 2010

A residential project in the city of Cremona, comprising a mixture of single-room and double-room flats, large-scale quarters and commercial premises: the new building, which replaces an agglomeration of artisan workshops, faces onto a tree-lined avenue just outside the old town centre along the course of the medieval city walls which were demolished at the beginning of the last century. The design, by architects Giorgio Palù and Michele Bianchi, features a number of accretions to the cube-like regularity of the building block which break up the frontage on the avenue side and affect room arrangement within. In keeping with the apparent simplicity of outline is a subtle personalising of the exterior achieved through technical dexterity. The regular modular layout of the inside volumes is a focus that shifts as the room arrangement interlocks and overlaps. Within the limited scale of an interior there thus form slanting vistas with surprising colour effects and see-through walls extending the range of view and increasing the interior interest as light filters from outside. The avenue-side façade divides into three lengthwise bands: the horizontal line of the ground floor is pierced by broad shop windows, but the eye is drawn to the residential first floor clad in burnished sheet-brass, punctuated by the horizontal line of windows. Above, the top floor maximises lighting by its line of full-length windows on a distinctly modular pattern heightening the vertical effect this time, contriving at once to soar and dematerialise. The essence of the design and implementation lies in the brass cladding which gives the building a curious ever-changing sensation. The solidity of the material heightens the “closed-in” impression. But there is a sense of transformation at work as the shifting tones of burnishing vary unevenly from zone to zone; while with changing natural light conditions intense sheens give unexpected life to the cladding material. The window-darkening...