Refurbishment and enhancement of the Villa Reale in Monza and of its gardens

2004

Monza (MB), Italy

placement

3rd place

team

David Chipperfield Architects (leader)

F&P architetti associati

G2BA Architetti Associati

Alberto Izzo & Partners

Giacomo Pirazzoli

Studio Spira Srl

services engineer

Ariatta Ingegneria dei Sistemi Srl

Sistemi Industriali Srl

structural engineer

Modena Ingegneria Srl

landscape architect

Carmen Anon Feliu

Franchi Lunardini partners

Maria Adriana Giusti

rendering and models

David Chipperfield Architects

client

Regione Lombardia

Comune of Monza

The Real Villa of Monza owes its importance to the archduke Ferdinando of Tuscany who instructed Giuseppe Piermarini to build a villa and have it decorated by the best Lombard's artists of the time. Inside the park, in 1922, was inaugurated the racetrack of Monza. For the project the restoration has been planned in a way to allow the villa to operate both as visit point for the citizens and as sumptuous venue for meetings/ international conventions and museum centre. The new building proposed for the Auditorium acts as connection with the new function anticipated for the villa: it underlines the orthogonal alignment of Piermarini's plan and with its simple and consistent architecture frames the north fa�ade of the Villa.

All the new buildings are subordinated to the main historical building and none of the new constructions raises over the inferior noble floor of the Palace. It seemed important to provide a new architectural sign, together with the restoration works in a way to be able to identify the period this revalorization has been realised. The surfaces of the new building were projected in an almost neutral and simple way in order to enhance the richness of the Piermarini' surfaces. In the project, the core of the Real Villa is absolutely the dominant element of the complex

The project of the new building proposes a neutral back scenery with a simple orthogonal volume. Objective of the criteria assumed for the solutions of project, founded upon the awareness of the double polarity memory-resource, of the historical patrimony, is to establish the limits and the ways of the operations of restoration both respect to demands of adaptation and technological-structural adjustment both respect to possible integrations and reimbursements of surfaces and decorum. These, in fact, will never have to assume the entity of a wide remaking and the connotation of a restoration � "the identique" of significant components by now irremediably lost, respecting the principle of the "minimum intervention." The presence of more decorative phases cannot legitimate hypothesis of stylistic homologation of one of them in order to support a of stylistic unity criteria.