Casa Bassetti, Azzate

housing

project

1960 - 1962

construction

1961 - 1962

location

Azzate via Foscolo 29

collaborators

Giampaolo Cantù (direzione lavori)

Ignazio Vigoni

Elena Balsari Berrone (progettista del verde)

builder

Eredi di G. Bossi (impresa edile)

client

Fratelli Bassetti

manufacturing technology

Load-bearing structure: visible reinforced concrete piers; load-bearing brick wall

Façade: white plaster coating

Windows: natural pitch-pine, with shutters

Roof: roof garden (south side); copper sheet pitched roof (north side)

description

Villa Bassetti stands on a rugged piece of land close to a terraced hillside facing Lake Varese and is surrounded by a pine grove, left untouched during the project.

Its complex plan, with three functional volumes, reflects the designer's attempt to adapt the house to the lie of the land. An entrance portico along the north-east side of the house leads to the day area and the living room, accessed directly from the steps under the portico. A staircase leads from the ground floor to the intermediate first floor with the studio and guest rooms and then on to the upper floor with the master bedroom overlooking the living room decorated with a drawing by Renato Guttuso hanging against a white plaster wall. The servants' wing, at the same level as the entrance portico, includes the kitchen and dining room opening onto a partially covered loggia. Instead the north-west front is characterised by a fan-shaped volume with the children's bedrooms, accessed by an independent staircase and arranged around a communal playroom. The children's area and the garage are covered by roof garden terraces while the rest of the house has pitched, copper sheet roofs. The interior floor plan has been radically modified to create four independent apartments.

Together with the villas in Ello, Carimate and Barzana, the house in Azzate - radically modified over the years - is part of a study on contemporary living, considered the "bridgehead" of a modernist "Palladianisation" of the traditional holiday landscape of the Lombard aristocracy. In the sixties Magistretti's architectures boosted the nonchalant revival of dwelling-in-nature embodied by the informal country houses of an upper class that had learned to appreciate industrial design as a new form of signature collectionism. Rather than individual "objects", Magistretti proposed sophisticated environmental paintings (Irace, 1999, p.23).

bibliography

V. Magistretti, L'architetto Magistretti: un protagonista di fronte al rame, in Il Rame 18, giugno 1967

La forma della funzione, in Design Habitat, settembre 1973

A. Terzi, La parola ai progettisti, in Ville e giardini, giugno 1986

N. Zanotti, A scuola dall'architetto Magistretti, in Il Piacere, novembre 1986

C. Bellini, Vico Magistretti. Il mestiere di architetto, in Office Furniture, supplemento Habitat Ufficio n.43 43, aprile 1990

R. Bianchi, Bozza di articolo "I tre volti di Magistretti" per La mia casa, dicembre 1991

C. Bellini, Il mestiere di architetto, in Habitat Ufficio 21, settembre 1986

V. Magistretti, Relazione di progetto, Casa Bassetti, Azzate, 1960-62

Residenza di campagna sopra Varese, in Abitare 25, 1964

G. Ponti, Una casa di Magistretti, in collina, in Domus 409, dicembre 1963

R. Aloi, Villa Bassetti ad Azzate, Varese, in Ville di Oggi, Hoepli, Milano, 1964