Author: Orsina Simona Pierini

What gives unity to an interior design project? Beyond the coherence of materials, it is the use of color that gives character and identity to domestic space; each architect, each era has its own palette, where the floor, walls, and ceiling are composed with the dominant hues of the chosen materials.

If the twentieth century and early rationalism fought their battle between pastel shades and primary colors, the weight of the times and of war was tinged with greens and browns. The explosion of optimism brought back blues, mauves, and pinks, while the Viennese use of black and white was recovered to emphasize the graphic quality of forms. Gio Ponti is brighter, Viganò more elegant, Sottsass more contrasting. When the home becomes an artist’s canvas, color is its instrument. Some architects are directly associated with a particular tone, and vice versa: Caccia Dominioni’s red is so different from the red that invades homes in 1968. The percentage and density of color increase more and more up to the 1970s, when the monochrome home is completely immersed in dark blues and browns.

80 double-page spreads feature a brief description of the interior, several images of the spaces, and on the right-hand page, the color palette for floors, walls, ceilings, and furnishings, providing at a glance the chromatic essence of each environment. The entries are grouped by decade and preceded by a brief summary of the “spirit” of the decade and its color range. The book opens with an introduction by Stefanie Wettstein and closes with a piece by Chiara Mazzola on palettes. All texts are in both Italian and English.

For the first time, a book enters the homes of Milan and describes the development of interiors from the advent of modernity to the season of post-modernism. The volume is in two languages Italian/English.

The authors have conducted vast and innovative research work, combing through period magazines, the archives of architects and photographers, and the investigations of Triennale, noticing that the journey of interior architecture has intermingled with the accelerations of Arts Avant-gardes and the emergence of a new role for objects. Italian design comes also from here.

The elegant and particular modernity of some Milanese masters, such as Franco Albini, Ignazio Gardella and Luigi Caccia Dominioni subsequently gives way to the experiments and international approaches of Joe Colombo, Ettore Sottsass, Vitoriano Viganò and Nanda Vigo, while each decade defines its own common language, interpreted by different personalities such as Magistretti and Minoletti; Mangiarotti and Morassutti, Zanuso, and by the Latis and Monti brothers, who share the “Milanese canon” in which elegance and practicality are combined. An intimate and reserved portrait of Milan emerges, sometimes predictable and often unexpected–a new look at the city.

There is mounting interest in the golden years of Milanese architecture – an age that spanned all the way from Giovanni Muzio’s early Ca’ Brutta experiments to the Modern Seventies.

Milan Houses is the product of years of research by the authors and a Politecnico di Milano team led by them. Every building featured in the book comes with one or more pictures by Stefano Topuntoli or from archive material.

With a foreword by Cino Zucchi – a renowned architect and scholar of Milanese architecture – the book includes two critical essays by the authors that place Milan’s golden age in the broader context of 20th-century architecture. A map is included with all the buildings’ locations.

Rounding out the volume is a vast bibliography edited by Maurizio Grandi.

The English translations of the texts can be found in the appendix.