The Home for an Artist in Cesena, Italy, was designed by Piraccini + Potente Architettura in 2019. The rural-inspired house combines contemporary vision with traditional forms. The house reflects the client’s aesthetic sensibilities, blending technology and art for a harmonious living environment.
Piraccini + Potente Architettura Design a Contemporary Italian House
The task of an architect is to meet the needs of their client through the intellectual work of design. Consequently, the architect, using their ability to learn from the past, read the present, and interpret the near future (clairvoyance is excluded), incorporates their personal vision of the contemporary into the work, understood as morphological, functional, and technological innovation. However, clients don’t always have the insights to grasp or appreciate certain aspects, which depends on their cultural background; their sensitivity; or their propensity to simply trust that the architect will do a good job.
So, if the dialogue between architect and client can be undermined by misunderstandings and a different ability to envision, the history of this project proves the exact opposite.
Home for an Artist Reflects Client’s Aesthetic Sensibilities
The client is Marcantonio Raimondi Malerba, an artist/designer who, over the last few years, has marked the world of industrial design with his creations. Through his vision of the contemporary, his cultural background, his pronounced irony, and love for nature, he has created works that have already become icons of our time, one of them being the Monkey Lamp produced by Seletti.
Marcantonio’s house, from the beginning, from the first drawing on the white sheet, was designed through a common narrative thread, an elective affinity that led to the definition of a project that speaks the same language: the designer’s vision is the same as that of the client.
The morphological reference used is that of the rural house of the Forlì area, historically widespread in the territory: it is a two-storey building with a regular shape and a gabled roof. In the project, the morphology of the rural house is reinterpreted through a contemporary reading of forms: simple and stereometric volumes that identify in the collective memory the archetype of the house as a child might imagine drawing it.
Marcantonio’s house is thus made up of a set of white-coloured volumes that fit within a natural landscape characterised by dense trees, hills, and agricultural fields.
Access to the building is a volume of steel and glass, reminiscent of the winter gardens of country villas, connecting the house on one side, and the studio on the other. A fourth volume, used for services, is placed adjacent to the pool.
The building was designed with a structure made entirely out of wood, with mineral and organic insulators and materials.
Bio-climatic architecture strategies were used: both through the use of natural ventilation and favouring solar radiation in winter and shading during the summer months. In the centre of the two main bodies, the building of steel and glass serves the function of a solar greenhouse: this element has the ability to capture solar radiation naturally heating the interior rooms. A retractable shading system interrupts its functionality in the summer months to avoid overheating.
The building has zero emissions in the atmosphere, as it is not connected to the gas grid and does not use energy sources from combustion.
The sustainable design is a characterising element of the ethical design and research that Piraccini + Potente Studio has been carrying out for several years: it pursues the goal of respecting the natural environment and its available resources.
This approach extends to the necessary enhancement of the nature characterising Marcantonio’s works, with the aim of ensuring that the architecture of his home reflects, in addition to the designer’s sensitivity and style, also the fantastic inner world of the client, which is so clearly expressed in every work he creates.
