What leads to innovation in the design of a residential tower?
Antonio Citterio: Innovation starts with thinking, prior to the definitive project. La Bella Vita is an interesting work in terms of its social type, because it offers a sort of co-living arrangement inside a compound, which reinforces the sense of sharing and being in a community. The possibility of having spaces of exceptional quality for sports and fitness in the same place as your home, for education or for welcoming guests to a dinner prepared in community kitchens, conveys the idea of a small village, where the sense of belonging and identity becomes very strong, especially in intergenerational terms. In certain aspects, it is the translation of the value of the public space of a large hotel into a residential building.
What are the other distinctive features of La Bella Vita with respect to the Treasure Garden skyscraper you designed and built in 2018?
Patricia Viel: The basic demands are different, as are the problematic issues, though the buildings are adjacent in space. The Treasure Garden is a tower with a relatively classic layout, organized with a central core and two large apartments per floor. It is a tall skyscraper, but one with a very standard ratio of occupation of its lot. La Bella Vita covers a much larger area of 33,000 square meters, and stands on a lot that is slightly set back from the main street. Our invention was to separate, to split up the overall volume into four towers that contain the 168 housing units, stacked around a central core. To find an erudite reference point, the concept is the one explored by Le Corbusier in the Ville Verte (Green City), the stacking of residential volumes with three sides exposed to the view of nature, and connected by a central core.
AC: The extremely significant part is that in this case the core, which is almost always hidden, has become an iconic feature, the landmark of the building, granting fuller meaning to the importance of the community spaces. With a height of 128 meters, it rises with respect to the four towers it connects; its hexagonal honey-color architectural skin, with warm amber reflections of the light, generates a sort of honeycomb that reinforces and underscores the relationship with the horizontal stone bands that define the terraces and the green biophilic dimension of the apartments.