MARCO   ZANINI 

In Varese, in the historic center of Casbeno, a 45-square-meter apartment from the early 1900s has become a small, radical laboratory. Together with a client who wished to practice circularity, the project transformed constraints into resources and scarcity into uniqueness.

Liberating Space, Unveiling Memory.
The challenge was to maintain three distinct rooms without compromising spatial quality. Our first move was a radical one: we overturned the distributive logic, integrating the kitchen into the living room to open them up to the monumental park of Villa Recalcati. The corridor thus became a visual funnel aimed at the park. In the same spirit, demolishing the damaged false ceilings unveiled the original timber ceiling, a material memory we preserved to unify the entire apartment. The green linoleum floor—a material made of 97% natural raw materials—completes the chromatic dialogue with the outdoors.

Matter that Generates the Project.
From here, every choice was born from listening to the materials, from a series of discoveries and episodes of resignification. The living-kitchen, a fluid space between the entrance and the exterior, is defined by a timber wall made of recovered industrial packaging and traversed by a steel beam that re-emerged during the works. The bathroom, in just 4 square meters, is an exercise in upcycling. Tiles destined for landfill—warehouse scraps from a building supplier—were composed into a mosaic to define and organize the space: white for the shower, black for the sink, grey as a backdrop for the fixtures. A continuous floor unifies this chromatic narrative, guiding the gaze towards the window. It is a compositional strategy that not only characterizes the room but also perceptually expands it, transforming a limitation into an asset. The discovery of an ancient masonry arch, left exposed as a niche, added a fragment of memory. The most radical transformation is that of the storage closet, which from a typically dark corner of the home becomes a lantern of light. We recovered the original window frames, making their glass opaque to transform it from a simple container into a luminous device. It now diffuses a soft light and becomes the visual pivot of the home: its translucency generates unexpected diagonal views that break the constriction of the corridor and bring all the rooms into dialogue.

Process: A Collaborative Model for Reuse and Self-Construction
I did not limit myself to designing. I called on my father and my uncle, former building craftsmen, to give new form to a family legacy: the 'will to make' (il 'voler fare'). While I did not continue their construction company, my professional practice is an attempt to unite vision and practical knowledge. We defined a hybrid working model, in constant dialogue with the construction firm. Our role developed in two phases: first, a parallel process of researching and preparing the salvaged materials; then, a direct intervention at the end of the construction to install the finishes and the kitchen. This allowed me to personally oversee the process and the result: from the skirting boards and the closet's window frames to the plywood panels and the marble from an old butcher shop. The result is a reversible assembly born from a novel mix of skills: the technical expertise of the firm, the artisanal knowledge of my family, and the design vision. A fusion of thought and matter.

Re-sign: The Project’s Philosophy.
I like to call this approach Re-sign, a word that holds a crucial dual meaning for me: resign, the renunciation of a way of building that imposes and wastes; and re-sign, the act of resignifying, of giving new meaning to what already exists. Here, the material generates the project, not the other way around. And this logic extends to the future: many of the materials were dry-laid according to the principles of Design for Disassembly, for an architecture without rubble, only materials ready for a new life.

A Necessary Architecture. 
With 60% of reused or bio-based materials and a cost of 700 €/sqm, the intervention demonstrates that sustainability can and must be accessible; a sustainability founded not on high technology, but on adaptive intelligence. It is an aesthetic of the “unfinished” (Crespi 2023) that celebrates memory and imperfection not as a limitation, but as the foundation for an architecture that is more authentic, necessary, and full of meaning.