This small apartment of 40 square meters In Rome it is a rarity. And it is especially because the floor is located in one of the very scarce-Baranda houses of the capital, a very widespread architectural model in northern Italy, but not so much in Rome. In the San Lorenzo Barrio de San Lorenzo, at the beginning of the last century, these «buildings-formitory» were built for the workers of the different factories in the area and for those who would soon work in the new EUR neighborhood: small rooms, common services and, in rare cases, the privilege of a balcony that gives to an inner courtyard, as in this.
«The surface of the house, only 40 m², offered a rectangle that I decided to subdivide in different rooms through the use of mobile walls, conceived as screens,» explains the architect Carla Arbitito. The Apartamentos Building, inhabited almost entirely by residents of a lifetime, is an example of social resistance to bolts: a cozy place, a small city within a city in a neighborhood that was one of the first to suffer the bombings of World War II. In fact, the building lost an entire part at that time and today carries the memory of it on its main facade, where there is a gigantic work by street artists Guerrillas Spam. «The mother of all peoples «So the mural is titled,» is a kind of triptych that remembers the war, which destroyed the San Lorenzo neighborhood in 1943 and today, whatever it is, «says the architect.
«The roofs of 3.5 meters high, even in this small apartment Of 40 m² of Rome, they allowed me to consider the space in terms of volume: dividing it, I made three cubes; A first, all green, which contains the kitchen and the bathroom, plus the other two that retain the original red and yellow cement soils that inspired the colors of the entire small apartment, «says Arrabito. The reform was integral: almost all the furniture is yours, as well as the mobile plywood walls.» The choice was economical: this 40 m² house was designed from the beginning to be rented, so he needed an intervention to do it. Functional in all senses: to the round table of the kitchen is a folding card table. If you don't need it, you put it in a corner and release space for something else. «