Dante 47 Apartment Block

The Italian city of Cuneo in the west of Piedmont, a region bordering France, is aptly named. Cuneo in Italian means “wedge”, which exactly describes the city’s urban configuration. Wedged between the confluence at the north-eastern end of the city of two rivers – Stura di Demonte and Gesso – it resembles the tip of a spear trusting down from the mountains towards the plain. Rising on a central plateau in the Southwestern Alpine arc to then stretch northeast towards the Po Valley, the city has a grid structure of orthogonal streets running longitudinally, from northwest to southeast, and transversally, from southwest to northeast. A long central axis – Via Roma, Piazza Galimberto, and Corso Nizza – creates perpendicular intersections with the streets connecting the Gesso and Stura rivers.

The city’s medieval and subsequent Baroque matrix underwent considerable development during the 19^th century, and later between the 1960s and ’70s. However, being far from Italy’s metropolitan hubs, Cuneo has been the recipient of relatively few architectural projects in recent decades and so has a limited supply of contemporary-standard housing.

This general need for architectural renewal led to Studio Kuadra’s residential project, selected from the submissions to an ideas competition issued by a real estate development fund. The brief assigned to this Cuneo-based architecture firm was to build 26 top-end apartments in a block that would meet the esthetic, spatial, and functional requirements of contemporary living.

The project site is already significant: Corso Dante, the city’s main tree-lined avenue connecting the Gesso and Stura rivers that since the early 20^th century has been a neighborhood with key city institutions and prestigious residential complexes. The new apartment block at Corso Dante 47 therefore benefits from a prestigious location but...

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