An interior design in Messina
The site of the restructured interior is a building complex constructed in the sixties in the upper part of Messina city centre.
The six floors buildings repeat the same typological and distributive schemes without considering the sun exposition and the panoramic views. The use of noble materials (marble, wood), in the buildings entrance hall can't dissimulate the speculative nature of the intervention, clear in the exterior spaces organisation and in the flats finishing, The early degrade of the waterworks, sanitary fittings, electric installations and floors anticipated the restructuring programme.
The pre-existent situation
The flat is located on the fifth floor with two of its slides facing the "Stretto di Messina". From the entrance, the parts of the house were served by a large distributing space without any direct lighting. Other smaller and darker distributing spaces brought to each room. A secondary door opened directly into the kitchen.
The bathrooms and bedrooms occupied the panoramic sides, facing East and North East.
The project
Aims of the intervention were: giving the house a large study-library zone, recovering the view on the "stretto" giving a higher quality to the spaces with the use of natural and during material such as wood (bubbinga) and marble (calacatta).
The entrance zone was enlarged to create a continuous space with the living room and dining room, receiving direct light and marked by the different treatment of the floor. The study-library space had a privileged position connected with its use and two independent accesses. The two shutters windows have been substituted with one glass ones, to enhance the natural light and visibility.
Kitchen and breakfast zone took the bathrooms place, recovering the panoramic view and the use of the terrace. The bedrooms were placed opposite to the pre-existent ones.
Some structural, pre-existences have conditioned and characterised the intervention: the lower parts of the ceiling have been marked and used to insert the lighting; the pillars have been transformed in isolated columns emphasising their structural function.
The distribution of the bedrooms is accomplished using a book-case wall of the same height as the doors and the lower parts of the ceiling. The separation of the service area (kitchen, breakfast, laundry), continuously with the entrance marble floor is obtained with a wall as high as the book-case wall. The two walls, distributing elements, are placed lengthwise, as plans/objects belonging to the living room space. The interior doors are considered as constituent elements of the walls and the furniture. The marble breakfast table is an extension of the walls and the floor.
The entrance zone delimitation is marked, as well as by the floor difference, by a marble parallelepiped 1,20 meters tall, working as a shelf and as a radiator case, with the explicit purpose to make of an object a part in the interior space construction. Built in wardrobes and fixed book-cases as alternative to single furnishing pieces, have been used as partition walls.
AUTHORS
FÁTIMA FERNANDES AND MICHELE CANNATÀ
CLIENT
VINCENZO FERA
LOCATION
MESSINA. ITALY
DATE OF THE PROJECT
1993
DATE OF EXECUTION
1993
COST
100.000 EUROS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Casa Fera in Giornale dell'ARCHITETTURA, Università di Palermo, nº 9. Pag. 11.
Casa Fera, Messina, Italia in Architécti Magazine, nº 44. Pag. 114 and 115.
