Domus Srilanka Magazine - January 2016

In this issue

The preservation of large public buildings is overbearingly complex and unsustainable if not developed hand in hand with promotion and maintenance. The Villa Reale in Monza represents a virtuous example of public and private bodies working together toward giving the restored monumental premises back to the citizenry.

The extraordinary quality of work by the celebrated graphic designer Ikko Tanaka has become the departure point of a very special project by Issey Miyake, who dedicates it to his master for being an endless source of inspiration.

The architect was tasked with designing the head office of a leading apparel solutions provider in Sri Lanka. Focusing on the client’s requirement to maximize the footprint and height of the building to generate sufficient space, the architect conceptualized the design as a ‘glazed box’.

A new project built in a wooded area in Southern New England illustrates the poetic approach of this famous Japanese office. A strong talent in reading the landscape resulted in a piece of architecture winding freely through the site’s morphology, where the relation between indoors and out is not clearly defined, but modulated and regulated according to exposure to sunlight, which determines the layout of the functions.

A recent university building by this famous firm from New York shows how the composition of space can determine new forms of collaboration. Specifically overlapped areas for “making” and “studying” create a central third volume that is the library, seen as a meeting ground for the sharing of knowledge.