Atlas Villa Brenna

The building, one of the partnership’s last works, is part of the low-density expansion of the city onto the neighbouring hamlets on the hillside. The building has been partially remodelled over the years, so altering the initial project. The house is built on three levels: basement, ground and first floor. The basement houses the service spaces, while the ground and first floor have two apartments with independent entrances from the access area between the main body of the house and the volume of the garage. This porticoed entrance area, level with the garden, was originally designed without being enclosed. It is a space that reproduces, in reduced dimensions, the entrance hall of an urban house: it welcomes and orders the circulation and accesses to the homes. The volume of the building reflects the free internal plan, similar to the ground and first floors, creating an articulated layout. The apertures depend on the interiors: small squares for the bathrooms, large windows for the living rooms overlooking the valley and the first arm of the lake. The side facing the city is embedded in the portico of the basement and, above it, in the first-floor loggia and a pocket terrace in the plane of the pitched roof. The entrance hall and the garage volume are elements that complicate the form of the house, which is mainly regular. From the parallelepiped of the central part of the house protrude the projections of a terrace to the north-east and two bow windows on the south-west side. The pitched roof recalls the vocabulary of German Expressionism. The roof, covered in slates, starts from the ground, as if it were its natural continuation, and then modulates according to the spaces it covers. The shape is complicated by descending with a considerable slope to cover the entryway and garage, above which an attic is created with a dormer window, a space originally built as a conservatory.