INA casa housing in Cesate

Franco Albini – Quartiere Ina Casa a Cesate, 1951 – 1954

The construction of the popular district of Cesate is one of the most significant episodes of the first seven years (1949-1956) of the INA Casa program: here, in fact, the Municipality commissions a group of well-known professionals – the three BBPR (Lodovico Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti and Ernesto Nathan Rogers), Gianni Albricci, Ignazio Gardella and Franco Albini – the project for a new extensive settlement, in response to the high demand for housing.
The request for release from the presumed orthodoxy of an international modernist language, expressly formulated in the INA Casa manuals and by the scientific commission, is taken by Albini as an opportunity to develop a totally original solution: each group does not end in the combination of identical "cells" , but it is the design outcome of the "interpenetration of volumes and surfaces" (Fagiolo, 1975). Based planimetrically on a rhomboid generator, each unit is set in the neighboring assuming an "L" development, which allows to guarantee the double facing to the living room, located on the ground floor, and to fan the rooms on the first floor. The distribution of the sleeping area takes place starting from a central corridor which is accessed by means of a spiral staircase in concrete grit, set on the lower floor at the junction point of the living room.

The study that Albini reserves for the relationship between internal and external spaces of the units, both in plan and in elevation, is very in-depth: the rhomboid generator of the plan of each accommodation is in fact rounded off in the external corners generating a succession of interpenetrated octagonal-based volumes, the whose juxtaposition allows the roof to have a single rectilinear and uninterrupted gutter line, which allows a rational constructive regularity.
Source: Carlo Venegoni ( https://www.ordinearchitetti.mi.it/it/mappe/itinerari/edificio/642-quartiere-ina-casa-a-cesate/15-franco-albini-e-milano )