Panetteria Princi in Milan... Especially as architecture and food are directly related here. This project fuses the life elements - water, air, fire and earth, which are crucial to cooking and baking, just as they are to architecture ... In principle the Panettria consists of a single, large, lucidly articulated room where all the activities needed to make bread - one of our staple foods - and other baked goods, including selling and eating them, take place at the same time. Rigorous geometry is paired with warm colours and sensual materials: rough porphyry for the floor, rough stone blocks as counters and shaped as tables to stand at, earth-coloured brass panes as wall cladding, fire for baking - visible from everywhere, presented as a focal point - and of course wood, for the place where the kneading and baking take place. Baking as elemental, primal activity, something that is normally kept from our eyes, is deliberately thrust into the foregound, spatially intensified. It happens behind great panes of glass, and can be seen both from outside and inside. The division between manufacture and selling is removed. Both take place in the same space, on the same stage. And just as all the activities are spatially linked, so are all the materials closely related to each other.
-texts Architectural Esssentials by Claudio Silvestrin, p126 The architect, the cook, and the taste Birkhauser
Just 5 minutes from Duomo, we could get this modern, crowded bakery.
As the architect said, the space was for all social strata. It was a democratic space in which everyone feels good regardless of background or status. but you've got to dash to try their bread before lunchtime!
-photo July 2008 in Milan
