Piuarch

Piuarch’s long business partnership with the fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana began at the beginning of the new millenium, when it designed their first offices with a showroom in via Goldoni in Milan. It involved the renovation and regeneration of some old buildings focusing on simple forms and recycled materials, which went on to characterize several of its projects for this Milanese fashion house. The conservation and functional conversion project developed by the Milanese group is based around the internal courtyard of an old office building in the Risorgimento district – featuring two parallel buildings, each six storey high, with a bearing structure made of reinforced concrete and totally transparent curtain wall façades.
Open-space areas were created on the various levels, separated by large stanchions covered with black opaline glass and embellished with glass ceiling lamps, in order to create spaces for holding the showrooms for the various collections, offices, a restaurant and various reception areas, managing to hold onto the old structure. The fifth floor, entirely allocated for reception spaces, is crowned by a spacious double-height garden covered by a pergola made of teak, which provides a theatrical backdrop to the meeting room. A stairway coated with pumice stone leads up to the second level of the outdoor setting: a large terrace overlooking the gardens of San Benedetto Monastery.
The entrance of the building in via Goldoni, raised in relation to street level, rests on a basalt base and is embellished with landscaping. It also features large skylights, which inject rhythm into the entrance directing the onlooker’s eyes towards the internal glass elevations, it overlooks the internal courtyard, which looks like a kind of tropical island with agaves and palm trees surrounding a pool of water which, in turn, is also coated in basalt. On the outside the architects set out to focus on the building’s original architecture: preservation and enhancement operations ranging from a meticulously careful choice of quality, natural materials that are also sophisticated – such as pumice stone and teak – combined with the simple geometric forms of glass and aluminium to define the façade. The old aluminium façade structure has been kept, entirely re-glazing it with up to 6 m long sheets of glass, also injecting rhythm into the design of the building front by incorporating structures made of teak wood. Inspiration for this design came partly from Bozzetto per murale from 1956 by the Venezuelan painter and sculptor Alejandro Otero.