This historic building in the centre of Lugano houses the head office of the credit institute, founded by Vittorio Cornaro in 1952. Over the decades, as often happens, the building underwent numerous interventions dictated by the varying needs of each period. By the 90s, the building could no longer satisfy the ever-growing demands of technology or the need to present an image worthy of a headquarters. Thus, the new director, Paolo Cornaro, decided to undertake a renovation of the entire building so as to create an environment that would ensure efficient operations for decades to come and an appearance that appropriately represented the philosophy of the private institution. After being completely emptied, the building was virtually reinvented with the creation of an entrance hall and a large inner courtyard overlooked by the office balconies. The front was reduced to a mere façade, held up temporarily by metal trestles and the walls of the underground floors, and subsequently restored, modified, and restructured almost in its entirety. Ridden with shop windows, the building’s street level “baseboard” had lost the impact and sobriety called for by the architecture of the time; in this regard, the intervention successfully restored dignity to the entire building. The entrance hall, with its succession of lively forms and lines, transmits a sense of dynamism that extends out from Nag Arnoldi’s centrally-placed sculpture of a group of people struggling to rise up. In fact, dynamism and the determination to climb ever higher effectively symbolize the philosophy and credo of the bank’s owners. On the ground floor, the inner courtyard with the overlooking balconies features a series of counters for the public created from stone slabs and a glass and metal structure covering the central space. A sequence of brise soleil and sinuous metal elements create a play of light and shadow that sketches moving lines on the interior façades, which also shift according to the season and the time of day. The pool of water with its waterfall serves a double function: in addition to being decorative, it creates a background noise that contributes to the well-being of those working on the upper floors open to the courtyard. This natural sound pleasantly masks the conversations of clients at the counters and of office workers upstairs. For Camponovo, this defining feature is also related to an important aspect of the life of the architecture studio. “The water in the fountain inaugurated my daughter Guya’s career after she joined the studio as an architect on the planning staff; that is to say, it was her first work – the first in a long series of respected interventions that continue to make a valuable contribution to the architecture studio.”
Guya Camponovo
1992
Pregassona
Banks and Financial Institutions, Projects