Forze Armate, Milan (Italy)

“The design has to be agreeable to the architect who designed it, the purchaser who commissioned it, and the final users who will being using it: the attempt is to treat the architecture like a large sculpture, where the proportions, the colours, and all the various constituent parts participate in a harmonious conclusion.” Designer of numerous buildings in Milan and abroad, Giovanni Mistretta makes a clear separation between building construction and architecture, maintaining that beauty is the real added value of a work of architecture. His buildings are intriguing objects that are quite unique on the Italian panorama, for both the masterful volumetric articulation and the recurring use of façades entirely clad in ceramic material, a “tattooed” skin with refined colour combinations and broad tonal fields that enhance not only the building but also its surroundings. A smoothed skin that with micrometric precision envelops refined conjunctions between cylindrical bodies, changing sinuosities, and profiles cutting like blades of stone that slice with rapid razor strokes the portions of a metropolitan sky, sometimes resplendent and transparent, sometimes as dense as a backdrop of grey felt impermeable to light, but sensitive to an architecture that is “inexorably” extraordinary in its formal determination. 
 

The presence of an air space between the face and the load-bearing structure of the building produces an insulating effect thanks to the flow of air technically defined as the “stack effect”. Naturally, if the surface exposed to the outside is an aesthetically interesting material that is resistant to atmospheric agents and urban pollution, it means that a building has been created with maintenance costs reduced to the absolute minimum. Ventilated façade and ceramic materials, therefore, to build an architectural envelope that is hermetically sealed but at the same time ventilated, thus creating a system in harmony with the regulations in relation to energy savings, and this is one of the most modern and reliable construction procedures that constitutes the ideal technological solution for reducing the thermal bridge phenomenon, which often leads to condensation, mould and mildew.
 

Volumetric complexity, attention to detail, and selected materials for a language that focuses on beauty: when the architecture surpasses its function as a container for people and becomes a work of sculpture in which the proportions and the choice of chromatic balances contribute to define a structure of lines and volumes in harmony with the surroundings and the urban context.

The residential complex rises in a semi-suburban zone, with high-end dwelling characteristics, and is a building with quite a complex geometric configuration in which the particular curvilinear form reveals the intention to create a “visual machine”, a continuous observatory with no dead angles on the urban landscape of an area of the city still undergoing development, a mutable urban organism rich in events and construction sites. In short, a metropolis or a “city that rises”, as the Futurists defined Milan in the early 20^th century. Attention to detail, overhanging bodies, co-penetration between architectural volumes rich in formal variants that require suitable materials to highlight the value of a building that can be defined as an “object” on an urban scale.