ALICE IN WONDERLAND

“Ornament and Crime”

How can we match decoration and an idea of Architecture which represents a contemporary and international lifestyle? This is the experimental theme for Andrea Marcante (UdA) and Adelaide Testa in the restoration of a 250 sq.m apartment in the historical centre of Turin. Existing architectural features, maintaining their aulic and decorative elements like doors, stucchi, parquet were the starting point for an intellectual trip through the different expressions of space: Emotional and Cartesian. The decoration and use of wallpaper, interpreting the qualities of the emotional space is overlapped by the rigorous geometrical space of the plasterboard used to reinterpret the ambient. The architecture is a subtle white skin, icon of contemporary essentialism, re-covering the walls. A dressing of wallpaper, icon of traditional bourgeois homes and revealed by these stereometric geometries lit by integrated leds, suspends the individual between present and past architecture and decoration. The home becomes a stage where people and furniture are free to own and disown the surrounding context. Everything is pervaded by a subtle feeling of apparently incompatible extremes. Here instead reconducted into a delicate balance of reconciled contamination and co presence of opposites, a peculiarity of today’s world.

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project by MARCANTE – TESTA (UDA Architetti)

Other team members: Sara Fortin, Shino Hashimoto

Photographer: Carola Ripamonti