Matteo Gardino Architect
Demolishing is almost always the easiest choice. Almost never the best one.
I work mostly on buildings that already exist: flats, farmhouses to bring back, offices and company premises to put right, clothes shops, villas, and ruins where the only thing still standing is the vegetation and the ground around it. The job is the same in every case: understand what the place is already saying, before deciding what to add.
The materials come from the place too. I choose them honest and keep the flaws nature gave them: they are the ones a hand recognises by touch, and which, treated well, age instead of spoiling.
Frightening architecture doesn’t interest me. Simple solutions do — the kind that always hide something you cannot see.
The work
The studio is in Milan, in via dell’Annunciata, and I work throughout Italy. Outside it, I have built in Mexico and Brazil, drawn a flat in Dubai, and worked with a practice in Houston.
The complete portfolio — thirty-one projects, from a buried ice house on Lake Como to a tourist settlement in Mozambique — is on the Italian pages, with photographs and drawings for each one. See the projects (in Italian).
Four of them — the ones built outside Italy — are here in English:
Somewhere to put right? Send me a couple of lines about what it is and where, and I’ll tell you what I think.
+39 339 5432622 — VAT 10329750961
Registered with the Order of Architects of Milan, no. 19187 © Matteo Gardino. The projects, drawings and texts are mine; the photographs and renderings are by whoever is credited on each project page.
You are welcome to quote with a link; to reuse anything, please ask me.