2023.07
The home as a quarry
Materiality Matters
Milan, IT
When you buy a house you buy your future, but also a bit of its past. What are you going to do with that past?
There are so many good reasons not to throw away what you find on the fourth floor: it's simply already there and doesn't have to be transported. It should not be crammed and then disposed of in a landfill. And the new material that replaces it must be extracted (if not produced), packed, shipped, lifted, laid, treated.
They are all "good" reasons, but where is the "beautiful"?
In this house the gift is the Palladian floor in Carrara and red Levanto marble. And then there is the one of elegance, in black Portoro.
Just where new pipes and new services will have to pass. Or where the desire for new divisions and spatiality requires the presence of a new wall. If, for all these reasons, we need a new floor, why not use the old one to make the new one? Why not consider the house as the quarry for this new materiality, trying to transform within its walls, without letting anything out?
Helped by the hand of someone who knows the secrets of this matter, we can patiently crack. Then clean up and set aside.
Then decide together what the new form of this material will be.
With a small "stonecutter" the house that was previously quarried becomes a laboratory: small lines are obtained from the flakes of Carrara and Levanto. Their shape, with one side cut by the blade and the other broken, keeps the memory of its transformations.
With a common "hole saw" other flakes are transformed into the purest (Platonic) of shapes: the circle.
