On the eastern outskirts of the city of Brescia, where the countryside meets the urban fabric of the Costalunga district, a nineteenth-century farmhouse rediscovers its identity thanks to the measured intervention of the B+M Associati and Melissa Riccabella Architetto. The rural building, an integral part of the area’s historical agricultural landscape, was the subject of a radical restoration, initiated in 2021 and completed in 2024, which revealed its original expressive power while integrating a contemporary and sophisticated architectural language.
The project, approved by the Superintendency, is based on a calibrated balance between conservation and innovation. The new elements, though clearly recognizable, engage in harmonious dialogue with the existing structures, enhancing their historical value without ever camouflaging or overlapping. The heart of the project is the reinterpretation of the facade facing the internal courtyard: here, a large glass facade recalls the memory of the transparent infill walls that once enclosed the portico and barn, offering today visual permeability and continuity with the landscape.
The architectural composition plays with essential geometric forms, sober volumes, and transparent surfaces, capable of enhancing the solids and voids of the original structure. The interior spaces, designed for a client who collects modern graphic art, are configured as fluid and flexible environments, where the ancient dialogues with contemporary works, natural materials, and bespoke details.
The intervention does not merely preserve a building: it transforms it into a place inhabited by memory and projected into the future, where material recovery is interwoven with technology, and rural aesthetics find new forms of expression. “The Essence of the Past, the Vision of the Future” is, in this sense, a design manifesto: a successful gamble that demonstrates how restoration can also be a creative act, capable of generating new meanings from a historical structure.
B+M Associati
The B+MA srl studio, founded in 2015, arises from the convergence of experiences in the fields of urban planning, architecture, and engineering, with the aim of offering integrated and multidisciplinary design. The team combines thirty years of expertise and a high technical level, developing projects with BIM methodology to ensure rapid timelines and precise management of complex interventions. The studio operates on a national scale, assisting both public and private clients from feasibility to final delivery, with a rigorous, innovative, and quality-oriented approach.
For more info: www.bmasrl.it
CREDITS
Project: The Essence of the Past, the Vision of the Future
Architect: B+M Associati, Melissa Riccabella
Location: Brescia, Italy
Year: 2024
Photography: Doina Mogildea
