The project for the T7A2 building highlights some important issues about the identity of the residential buildings in urban context among the wide panorama of contemporary research in architecture.

The project, based on the idea of the Italian Palazzo, derives from different and complementary investigations: the first is the relation in term of scale, shape and identity, between the urban fabric and the single building. Behind the idea of the Palazzo there is infact the research for a building that provides a kind of neutrality, in other words able to belong to the city fabric.

We strongly believe that the city cannot be made by a collection of “singular objects” but by a complex and comprehensive tissue of relations between all its components. In our project, the geometrical frame which encases the entire building, memory of the architectural orders, gives it the capacity of dialogue with the different scales of the context, from the XIX century Parisian tissue to the monumental library Francois Mitterand.

The second is related to the will of creating a linkage between the research on contemporary residential buildings and the historical typology with which the European cities have been built over centuries with success. The use of neutral grid on the façade establish a dialogue with the rhythm of the context giving an interesting answer to the complex relation between the urban scale of the block and the domesticity of the single residential space. The black continuous geometrical frame, on which the Palazzo is built up, solves within a single element the problem of the scale, the constraints for its shape, the structure and the identity of the building. The frame becomes infact a kind of tridimensional membrane between outside and inside giving space to a living depth, a continous bow window or a loggia for the everyday life. Every apartments thus has its exterior space, while on the private side the frame supports balconies which look out onto courtyard.

The design of the frame and thus the regular grid of the structure, its position in the building and its geometric control allows maximum flexibility for the apartments dimension and typology.

Finally the artistic contribution of Alfredo Pirri enrich the proposal: the plumes located between the layers of the glass facade gives to the building a subtle poetic lightness.