Private residence “Casa di ConFine”

By Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi - 13 June 2019
Secco Sistemi, Schüco have participated in the project

Simone Subissati trained at the Florence School of Architecture. The Faculty still preserves traces of its past as a hub of innovation and experimentation when people like Giovanni Michelucci, Leonardo Savioli and Leonardo Ricci taught there, producing radical avant-garde groups like Archizoom and Superstudio. Even Umberto Eco lectured at the Florence Faculty for a brief period as did, for much longer, the unjustly forgotten Giovanni Klaus Koenig. Simone Subissati sat at the feet of Remo Buti, Gianni Pettena and Roberto Segoni, all tireless proponents of research and artistic commitment. “I started out on my own”, recalls Simone Subissati, “not having an architect father. I started at the bottom, working first in interior design, which earned me an Honorable Mention at the 2015 International Compasso d’Oro Awards”. Ineffably simple, Subissati’s design work shows his predilection for a minimalism that references contemporary art. His approach is conceptual rather than impressionist and looks to reinterpreting traditional craft materials. An example is his stool, Mattarello. Made of solid ash wood, it is a brilliant combination of solid materiality and abstract refinement whose geometrical design plays on the different circumferences of the component parts. Like many architects coming out of radical avant-garde schools, Subissati does not subscribe to the current tendency of most architects today to seek to integrate the architectural object with its surrounding context, even to the point of confounding the two - as in neo-impressionist works like Boeri’s Vertical Forest or Mario Cucinella’s ecological buildings. In contrast, geometrical integrity seems to be Subissati’s prime concern. For sure, geometrical purity has to be tempered and cast into question. But this should never be taken too far since it would divest the architectural object of its essential diversity as an artificial construct. The house presented in this issue is a private residence in the...