Alcova Inherits Villa Pestarini
There is a house in Milan that most people have never entered, and, until recently, had no particular reason to think about. Villa Pestarini — a compact rationalist structure completed in 1939 by Franco Albini — has been a private residence ever since, never a museum, never a monument. Simply a home, which is, in its own way, the most radical thing it could be. But Alcova has changed that. The villa stands open as a living exhibition space: the kitchen still works, the bathroom functions, the suspended marble staircase still floats beside the entrance as if defying you to ask how. And yet every room has been claimed by designers invited to think about what it means to inhabit a space already so thoroughly inhabited by history. The ground floor is where Albini's vision is most nakedly itself — light pouring through walls of translucent glass brick, the boundary between inside and outside rendered negotiable, even moot. It is here that "Albini in Present Tense," a collabor...
