Villa Tittoni
An eighteenth-century villa and its park become an opportunity to create a new cultural system.
library (completed - 2013/2014) and multi-purpose room (2015)
Desio (MB) (ITALY)
The project for the reorganization of the existing library, and that of the central body of the west wing of Villa Tittoni Traversi Cusani, is part of a broader intervention aimed at forming a “Park of Cultures” in the city of Desio.
The intervention, after the work of recovery and safety measures carried out by the restoration and conservative restoration project, has the task of rethinking the ground floor of the west wing according to some principles, which aim to change the traditional concepts of library, congress hall and exhibition hall, eliminating their typical immobility and making these environments flexible and permeable spaces where the central element is the relationship between the person and the cultural experience.
The central room of the library is no longer conceived as a dark place where people are surmounted by tall shelves full of books, but it becomes an open space full of light whose fulcrum is an “L” shaped system of sofas and poufs in which everyone can read a book comfortably seated or converse with others like in a living room. The high shelves are therefore moved from the center of the room to the walls, to create a frame for this “living room” in which lower bookcases are inserted on wheels, to make the space more flexible.
In the central body, on the ground floor, there is instead the conference room, which was conceived with two different layouts: in the first one resumes a classic arrangement in which the chairs are arranged in the direction of greater length; in the second one it was decided to rotate the chairs, so that the public can also admire the wonderful park of the villa. On the first floor of the building there are instead several exhibition halls in which the anchoring system of the paintings was designed in such a way as to completely free up the room if there were no exhibitions. There are also two rooms with different uses: a music room, where acoustic panels and new chairs will be placed, and a dance hall, in which a mirror will be inserted and which will also serve as an exhibition hall.