Why you should experience Casa Corbellini-Wassermann in Milan, Italy.
Casa Corbellini-Wassermann is a sophisticated residential work where Città Studi's interwar architectural character meets Piero Portaluppi's command of stone, unconventional domestic planning and a marble staircase carried from an experimental Triennale pavilion into permanent Milanese architecture.
Set along Viale Lombardia near Via Vallazze and just steps from Via Giuseppe Colombo, the residence occupies a garden-edged parcel where university buildings, mature street trees and substantial twentieth-century apartment houses mark the transition between Città Studi's institutional core and the residential blocks extending toward Loreto. Horizontal windows cut through bands of pink and gray Ornavasso marble across the lower stories before pale plaster takes over above, immediately separating the principal residences from the smaller upper apartments. A corner loggia, balcony and broad blind wall bearing a sundial disrupt any simple symmetry as the garden opens one side of the building away from the surrounding street wall. The helical marble stair rises within that garden as an independent sculptural form, giving an exterior counterpart to Portaluppi's unusually elaborate internal circulation. The result is a highly individual Milanese residence whose stonework, asymmetry and garden architecture compress Portaluppi's interwar experimentation into a single urban house.
What you should know about Casa Corbellini-Wassermann.
Casa Corbellini-Wassermann is best known for the residential project Piero Portaluppi developed after SAIR, Società Anonima Immobiliare Rinaldo, submitted its building application to Milan in December 1934. Portaluppi supplied the design and directed construction by the Luigi Gadola company through completion in 1936, producing a five-story building in territory west of Città Studi that was still approaching the outer edge of continuous urban development. The project joined two immense principal residences with smaller income-producing apartments, translating the social structure of the commission directly into architecture. The two principal apartments occupied the entire raised ground floor and first floor, contained 27 rooms apiece and were designed so they could be connected. Portaluppi rejected a conventional corridor in favor of three large distribution spaces connected by a short passage, setting circulation diagonally against the perimeter and separating principal rooms from service areas. Living rooms followed Viale Lombardia and continued toward the private garden, giving the street and garden fronts distinct domestic roles. The second and third floors divided into two independent apartments apiece, and a smaller residence occupied the uppermost level. Reinforced-concrete framing freed the exterior for broad windows, allowing Portaluppi to distinguish the principal floors through dense horizontal bands of pink and gray Ornavasso marble before shifting to simpler plaster and square sash windows above. The house consequently joined ambitious private accommodation, rental housing and structural modernity within one commission, with hierarchy expressed through circulation, scale and exterior treatment.
Portaluppi gave the principal interiors a separate architectural intensity through stone, wood, metal, painting and reused exhibition design. Green Alpi Cesana, green Issorie, green Roja, white Carrara, red Levanto and red Amiata marble appear across the interiors, turning changes in surface and veining into part of the spatial composition. The garden stair carries an especially unusual provenance: Portaluppi had designed its helical form in solid marble blocks with BBPR for the temporary Casa del Sabato degli Sposi at the 1933 Milan Triennale before transferring it into the permanent residence. A mural depicting the Po Valley occupied the entrance hall, joining figurative decoration to rooms otherwise defined by geometric stone and woodwork. In 2019 Studio Binocle, led by Lorenzo Bini with Antonio Citterio as consultant, completed a conservation project for the portions converted into the Milan headquarters of Massimo De Carlo. The intervention retained Portaluppi's finishes as contemporary exhibition rooms entered the former principal apartment, and the inaugural exhibition MCMXXXIV connected work by figures including Adolfo Wildt, Fausto Melotti, Arturo Martini and Gio Ponti with later artists. Casa Corbellini-Wassermann thereby entered another phase without surrendering the domestic surfaces and circulation that make Portaluppi's original project legible.
How to fold Casa Corbellini-Wassermann into your trip.
Casa Corbellini-Wassermann works as the anchor for a daytime exploration through Città Studi and the adjoining eastern districts using three nearby sites that move from interwar municipal recreation through twentieth-century private collecting into Gio Ponti's postwar experimentation with sacred architecture.
Begin at Piscina Romano, where Luigi Lorenzo Secchi translated his 1928 study of open-air municipal swimming facilities into a major Città Studi project the following year. Secchi had proposed a standardized 4,000-square-meter pool serving 1,500 bathers, aligned with a service and changing pavilion and supplemented by smaller structures for showers and sanitary facilities. The Milan commission became an early demonstration of his effort to coordinate public swimming through repeatable technical and spatial principles, preceding his later work on Piscina Cozzi. Its immense open basin established recreation as a substantial component of the district developing around the Politecnico. Continue to Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, housed in another Portaluppi building erected between 1929 and 1931 by Gino Radici and Francesco Di Stefano for Di Stefano's large family. Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano assembled more than two thousand works and formed close relationships with artists, creating a collection spanning Novecento Italiano, Mario Sironi, Corrente, Giorgio Morandi, Filippo de Pisis, Lucio Fontana, Spatialism and postwar abstraction. Antonio donated the collection to Milan in 1974 and 1988, and the apartment opened as a municipal museum in 2003 with hundreds of works returning to the domestic rooms in which the couple had lived with them. Conclude at Chiesa di San Luca Evangelista, the first Milanese church project through which Gio Ponti developed architectural ideas later pursued at San Francesco al Fopponino and Santa Maria Annunciata. Giovanni Battista Montini established the new ecclesiastical institution in 1957 after an initial chapel occupied an apartment on Via Jommelli, and construction began with the foundations on February 6, 1959. Ponti worked with Antonio Fornaroli and Alberto Rosselli on a raised building whose narrowing interior, exposed concrete structure, folded roof and facade translate structural forces into visible form; Cardinal Giovanni Colombo consecrated the church on October 22, 1966. The progression moves from Secchi's interwar model for metropolitan recreation through Boschi and Di Stefano's conversion of private collecting into a civic inheritance into Ponti, Fornaroli and Rosselli's postwar church, carrying Città Studi through three distinct experiments in architecture, patronage and public culture.
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