Fondazione Luigi Rovati / Mario Cucinella Architects

Textual content description supplied by the architects. The seven-year venture for the Fondazione Luigi Rovati marks the completion of the renovation and reworking of Milan’s nineteenth Century Palazzo Bocconi-Rizzoli-Carraro by Mario Cucinella Architects. The wholly new underground galleries of the Basis’s Etruscan assortment are on the core of this progressive addition to the town’s cultural and civic life at 52 Corso Venezia. Along with the Etruscan galleries, the Fondazione Luigi Rovati’s artwork museum homes two flooring of exhibition area, conservation services, an archive, a lecture room linked with the Luigi Rovati Basis Library in Monza, and occasion rooms, a bookshop, a café in addition to a restaurant on its high flooring.

2 hundred highlights from the Basis’s assortment of historical Etruscan artifacts are displayed in custom-made circumstances, designed by Mario Cucinella Architects, throughout the limestone-lined galleries of the otherworldly areas situated within the “Hypogeum Flooring” straight beneath the palazzo. On show are cinerary urns, vases, jewellery, and bronzes together with the celebrated Cernuschi Warrior, a votive warrior god relationship from the late-Sixth century to early-Fifth century BC. Works by modern artists – like Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Arturo Martini, Lucio Fontana, and William Kentridge are proven alongside artifacts created between two and three thousand years in the past. 

Comprising three round and one elliptical domed “caverns”, the Hypogeum Flooring’s kind and materiality are rooted in these of the Etruscan tombs of Cerveteri (in modern-day Lazio) and formed, too, by the bodily traits of the quarries of Firenzuola, the Tuscan supply of the blue-grey pietra forte fiorentina limestone inset with glowing mica flakes that organized in overlapping strata defines the structure of Etruscan tombs and the Twenty first-century galleries.

An enigmatic stone stair serves as an entry level to the Hypogeum Flooring from the Basis’s street-level entrance corridor.  This contains a ticket workplace, café bistro, and bookshop with entry to a courtyard backyard designed by Greencure Marilena Baggio Studio (Milan) during which the define of the museum’s domes is seen. A mezzanine homes the places of work of the Luigi Rovati Basis. 

The piano nobile has been rearranged and restored sensitively with thought of modern interventions by Mario Cucinella Architects. The second flooring is house to momentary occasions and exhibitions. The third flooring homes the Andrea Aprea restaurant named after the celebrated Milanese chef. The Basis’s examine assortment is held within the sub-basement beneath the Hypogeum Flooring.

This architectural journey via time and tradition, connecting life and afterlife, previous, current, and future over seven tales has concerned a daring engineering problem. “At one level, the constructing was just about suspended in mid-air”, says Mario Cucinella, referencing the interval throughout which the superstructure of the palazzo was balanced on slim momentary foundations as the quantity for the underground museum and the service flooring beneath it was excavated.   “Coincidentally”, provides Cucinella, “this theme of suspension can also be obvious within the idea for the Etruscan archaeology galleries. We wished to create a suspended ambiance. That’s why the Etruscan vases relaxation on nearly invisible bases giving the impression that they’re floating in mid-air.”