Umberto Riva, Casa Ferrario, Osmate, Varese (Italy), 1975

Casa Ferrario is designed by Umberto Riva, an architect and designer born in Milan in 1928. He studied architecture in Venice and finished his degree in 1959. Since the 1960s his work gave rise to the new shapes of contemporary ways of living. He maintained a marginalized position in the architectural field. Umberto observes the everyday life closely in order to discover the essence of banal details to infuse them with a new meaning and forms. He designed many houses for instance in Sardinia, Milan and Otranto.

The small Casa Ferrario has a thematic prevailing of a pine woodlot. It is located in the outskirts of Varese in Osmate. Characteristic is the lightness, given and suggested by the vertical rythm of trees.

The verticality of logs is repeated in the vertical ondulation of eternit planks that make the building volume vanish into a light and shadow alternance. The lightness of the vertical landscape that is projected towards the sky, is the key concept of the cottage. The house is projected both, towards the sky, and towards the ground since the basement is strongly radicated in the ground thanks to a thick layer of glass brick and cement. Zenital light penetrates the house through skylight windows. Shapes are dynamic and participate in stenghening the lightness. Therefore, they provide a sort of sense of mobility of the building within the shadows of the woodlot.
Initially, the house was meant as a holiday house with a cover area of 100 square metres. It onsists of three levels: the basement, the ground floor and the attic. The house extends outwards with a triangular porch. The mezzanine floor located above the living room, covers half of the building. The remaining space, which is half of the room, is double in height.

References:
Emilio di Gristina at Accademia di Belle Arti Palermo

Umberto Riva at v2com-newswire.com

Umberto Riva at artemide.com

Quaderni di Lotus, no. 10

Album di disegni , U. Riva ,Electa; 1989.

Un secolo di archittetura a Varese: Edifici del Novecento a Varese e in Provincia ,L. Crespi, A. del Corso, Alinea editrice; page 162, 1990