KOOZ Villa Clea is a fluid space which doubles as your private home and as a cultural centre dedicated to art. What drew you to this underused space and how does the project explore the potential of rethinking the house as an open territory?

MATTEO CORBELLINI The space of Villa Clea was originally a car workshop which had been abandoned for years. When we came across the site, it soon became clear that this was the only place where we could realise our vision of a fluid space, between a house and a space for art, rejecting the standardised idea of a nuclear family home.

Because of the multiplicity of activities that we wanted Villa Clea to accommodate, the architectural project was conceived in the most fluid manner — to the point that Allina and myself consider ourselves to be nomads within our own house. Now we are living all the way at one end of the house; when we have the artist in residency programme, we roll up our futon and relocate to the front end. In its most basic configuration, the house — which unfolds as a longitudinal enfilade of spaces — can be configured into three independent apartments, each with their small kitchenette and bathroom.

KOOZ So the house imposes a certain kind of relationship with your objects and possessions.

MC Indeed, this nomadic life requires us to be extremely selective with our possessions. We own two clothing racks — one each. With each of the moves — over a dozen — we’ve undertaken around Europe before settling in Milan, we eliminated more things to the point that at Villa Clea, we now live with the bare minimum.

KOOZ Let’s go back to the architecture of the building and how you approached its transformation, from a workshop into the space it is now.

MC I soon realised that the building was not in good shape. As much as I am in favour of retaining extant structures, this would have been quite a paradox: both structure and foundations were almost non-existent, whilst the roof was collapsing. We were lucky that the core analysis revealed that the site had not been contaminated, so no soil remediation was necessary.

KOOZ Do you have pictures of how it was?

MC Of course. Here you can see a picture of where we find ourselves now and in the original 1960s building, how the entire structure was constructed with these perforated concrete blocks.

KOOZ Materially speaking, I read that you used a mixture of cement and clay…

MC Yes this is a recipe I developed during the times of bureaucracy — that is to say, when I was trying to obtain the building permits for both the construction as well as the change of use from a workshop to a residential space.

From the offset, my visual and spatial intention was that of creating a monolithic block which would then be ‘lightened’ by full height windows and the transparencies of curtains. Rather than using standard cement, I specified a natural agglomerate like clay. By studying the work of a number of architects practising in Switzerland, Belgium and Austria —and with the help of a cement factory — I was able to formulate a recipe using 80% clay, which would satisfy both the spatial intentions of the project as well as the acoustic and thermal standards. The volume is then perforated by a number of skylights and opening up entirely to the little garden, which we were able to recuperate from the former furnace of the workshop to the north. In this manner, the stark, raw materiality of the earthy cement is juxtaposed by an ethereal light. In contrast to the monolithic nature of the house, various railings of curtains constantly alter its solid nature, making this non-programmatic architecture feel even more fluid and flexible.

KOOZ I love the fact that — along with the white walls — you have dispensed with the sterile lighting that characterises so many cultural spaces today.

MC The intention is to show objects and artworks in a more sentimental and domestic way, avoiding soulless LED lights. Alongside the presence of the mobile furniture elements, that was also a strategy to keep the domestic dimension present throughout all our exhibitions and events. Many of the elements that sustain our basic domestic needs are deployed during the exhibitions. For example, the counter behind you functions as our kitchen and was also the surface upon which a number of the paintings and sculptures were presented in our first show.

KOOZ What opportunities arise when rethinking cultural venues as spaces of intimacy and domestic spaces as public infrastructures?What does such a space offer within the context of a city like Milan?

MC The project is growing quite fast; through our last open call we received an extraordinary amount of submissions which I think is a positive testament to the model we are testing at Villa Clea, which was evidently absent within the cultural landscape of Milan.

I think there is something quite special that emerges from being part of a space that is in continuous transformation, incessantly hosting a variety of personalities and formats, always at the interplay of the fluidity between domestic and public. The house is at once our permanent dwelling and a temporary home to the artists who join us for specific residencies or for those who are simply stopping by for a temporary stay, as well as being the backdrop to a number of events.

KOOZ The project is situated just metres off from the Scalo di Porta Romana, an area which is in the midst of major redevelopment. How does Villa Clea position itself within the process of gentrification in the area?

MC As mentioned, we decided to embark on the adventure of Villa Clea as it seemed like a typology of building that we thought could accommodate our vision. Of course, it was also important for us to recognise that we were positioning ourselves in an area which hosts other cultural endeavours, such as the Fondazione Prada and the Fondazione ICA. In a way, we see Villa Clea as the kind of ‘S’ scale which completes the cultural offering of the ‘L’ scale with Fondazione Prada and the ‘M’ of Fondazione ICA.

In terms of the processes of gentrification, I believe these are embedded within the nature of urbanism. The moment something “cool” pops into an area that has not been previously considered by big investors, it is mathematical that this will drive interests and consequently, change will happen. Nonetheless in our little dimension, we believe in the positive cultural impact that a venue like Clea can have within such an area.

Beyond the cultural value which we hope to bring to the neighbourhood, I also like to think that we are lightening the environmental weight of the tight urban fabric surrounding us. I consider the informal forest that we are nurturing on the roof to be a qualitative improvement to the neighbouring high-rise residential buildings. Moreover, as a private house, we constantly try to include neighbours to come closer to contemporary art and culture, planting seeds for today and for the future.

KOOZ How does the project relate to the immediate community from the surrounding residential blocks?

MC Since the very beginning, our intention was to gently insert ourselves within the community, not landing as a foreign spaceship. Aiming to get to know the neighbourhood a little better during the construction process, Allina and I moved into an apartment in one of the residential blocks overlooking Villa Clea. Throughout the build, I was frequently on site — doubling as architect and construction worker — while Allina stopped by frequently. In those months we built a relationship of mutual respect with the local residents. The first real opening was celebrated with them, over glasses of bubbles and a lot of cake — the latter being the result of a cake workshop Allina did with the residents, and a pastry guru who lived in a condominium, having retired from the renowned Marchesi pastry shop. Although the neighbouring community is very responsive when we do informal gatherings, there is some shyness when it comes to art-related events. Even so, we continue to strengthen our presence with the local community while inviting the larger Milanese crowd to venture beyond the central institutions of the city. Hopefully these spheres will overlap in an increasingly spontaneous and informal way.

KOOZ The artistic programme is supported by the City of Milan, the European Commission's Metropolitan Cities Operational Program 2014-2020 and Fondazione Cariplo. Could you share how this funding structure drives the artistic agenda and its relation to both the immediate and broader community?

MC First and foremost, for us it is important that the artists’ residency programmes are always offered as true opportunities in support of artists; this does mean that we need to find fundings from different sources.We try to integrate a non-profit goal with the help of many different collaborations, which we always select in line with our ethics and values. The beginning of the residency programme was aided by an EC grant, which helped us to build a stable base and credible platform for artists, as well as the cultural program, the visual identity, the communication — all things we strongly believe and we love to offer to the art community. Nowadays the official programme continues independently, with my art direction and Allina as director for all cultural events.

KOOZ For the next Milan Design Week and MIART (Milan’s international modern and contemporary art fair), Villa Clea will host works from the first four artists in residence, as well as a performative work by Thuono alongside the LUNAA collection. Is this representative of the cultural trajectory you are paving for Villa Clea?

MC Again: we like to mix formats and different targets with the goal of inviting people to come closer to contemporary art and building up a community. The forthcoming exhibition will be the first moment in which the work of all the artists who lived with us for a period of time will be shown together. This is important for us because even as we imagine the exhibition in this space, we are collecting memories of the people behind each work, and the time passed together. Seven days might not seem like much, but it's enough to meet with a certain amount of intimacy — it’s an intense sort of retreat that we do together, meeting in a very human and direct way.

Just in front of Villa Clea in the shared courtyard in common, inside the atelier where we usually work and which I converted from the stock room of the old car workshop, we will exhibit LUNAA — the collection that Allina designed for the house. The goal is to launch the collection and to invite visitors to the Milan Design Week inside, to see the artists’ exhibition at Villa Clea. We invited Thuono to dialogue with the works for a one day experience of the space which music can do in a very deep sense.

KOOZ I think this sense of gathering community is embedded in the name of Villa Clea…

MC Indeed, I came up with the word Clea by drawing upon both the materiality of clay as well as the fact that in the Proto-Indo-European language, the syllable ’cl’ also stood for community. Considering that clay is an agglomerate, I thought this would synthesise the ambitions that Allina and I had for the space quite well,as one which unfolds around the idea of gathering people and the creation of a community.

Nonetheless when thinking of the typology of the building as an independent volume, I did not think that words as house or space did its justice. I was, on the other hand, continuously drawn back to the idea of a shared space like an ideal Renaissance villa. Then too, name has embedded in it a slight share of wit; within the intensely patchworked urban fabric on all sides, Villa Clea instantly acquires its own definition and character, miles away from the bourgeois countryside house.

Bio

Matteo Corbellini shapes spaces and imaginaries in a romantic perspective, combining hedonism to a material essentialism. He received his education in architecture in Venice and Paris, learning more from the atmosphere of those cities than from the schools themselves. He has worked with Jan de Vylder, Jo Taillieu, Arno Brandlhuber and Oana Bogdan, always blending theories and practice. He obtained his PhD in Architecture with a thesis entitled "Domestic Romance." He is the architect and art director of Villa Clea and the art director of LUNAA.

Allina blends painting, objects, setting and writing to create sensory atmospheric experiences. She obtained her PhD at Iuav University of Venice with a research focused on the role of intuition in the creative process and in everyday life. She is the director of Villa Clea's arts and culture program and the author of LUNAA.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.