Four recent interventions on Milanese architecture of the twentieth century tell a good story about a theme of great topicality: the restoration of the modern heritage. Over the last century, Milan has expressed valuable designers who have been able to weave with particular skill the knowledge of the context with structural innovation, the use of new covering materials with a language in dialogue with tradition. The close link between architect, client and craftsman has produced silent masterpieces, capable of weaving the new image of the modern industrial city through the precision of detail and the experimentation of materials. All in parallel with the rich figurative culture of the artistic avant-garde, whose authors have also been protagonists of Italian design. Today, while the European milieu rediscovers the Milanese twentieth century, that constructive experimentation shows its fragility and forces a specific reflection on the different ways of working on its materials. One of the strengths of this "new architecture" was in fact its transparency, allowed by windows and doors and facades that over time have proved to be one of the main reasons for the decay and the consequent need to replace many parts of the building. A fragility far removed from the problems of restoration of the great walls of the ancient.
The rebirth of Ca' Brütta by Giovanni Muzio, a well-known building in Via della Moscova on the corner of Piazza Stati Uniti d'America and Via Turati, is due to the homonymous grandson of the master and recovers the modern facades through the experience gained in traditional restoration. The Ca' Brütta is an abstract painting, a composition of solids, voids, colours and different materials, a polyptych with multiple facades. Recent restoration work has restored these backgrounds and their chromatic weight, as well as the broken ones and their graffiti: in this philological research, an original portion of the dark grey plaster was also reconstructed, which in the first few years also covered a substantial strip of the third floor, which was later lost. An apparently simple modification, but one that succeeds in restoring the balance of the weights of the entire composition.
Equally interesting is the technological intervention of recovery with which the architect Giulio Barazzetta pays homage to his masters Bruno Morassutti, Angelo Mangiarotti and Aldo Favini, who had achieved in the project of the church of Baranzate (in the hinterland of Milan) a precise synthesis of their technical knowledge. A large roof with an archaic flavour contrasted with the lightness of the iron and glass perimeter walls, which had quickly deteriorated. The entire building was the subject of the intervention, with all the detailed solutions rethought and realized with an elegant understatement, aimed at rediscovering the milky atmosphere of the light filtered by the new stratification of the facade glass.
Two other recent Milanese cases of adaptation of the Modern show a freer approach, based on the ability to reread and reinterpret with a different distance and ease.
In the case of the Campari building known as La Serenissima (in via Turati), the Park studio ventures to replace the entire facade with a new window: the dark tone of the burnished metal evokes the original work of the architect brothers Soncini, as opposed to the nearby light travertine of Ca' Brütta. The new facades, almost autonomous bodies, are technical performance machines that solve various problems: the retreat of the glass creates a depth that generates shadows and houses the movement of perforated sheet metal panels and at the same time is configured as a recovery of volume. In this case, there is no mimicry of the original project, but a free interpretation that re-proposes its character, its collective perception.
Alessandro Scandurra, on the other hand, is confronted with a work by Pietro Lingeri that has had a long and incomplete design process. The entrance solution, consisting of a representative portion of the façade against the main body, has been simplified, while new elements - gate and canopy - intertwine in a delicate play of lines with the new design of the patio. A metaphysical flavour is counterpointed by melottian quotations and twentieth-century touches, such as blocks of white cement. In this case it also evokes a cultural and artistic context, expanding the concept of character with the freedom of personal interpretation.