Castel San Pietro, Switzerland
Aldo Celoria architect

Building on a Swiss hillside, Aldo Celoria departs from local tradition, setting Casa Travella’s copper-clad box visually afloat atop a glass base

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	Photo © Milo Keller
	Aldo Celoria, Principal
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The neighbors didn’t like it. A copper box atop a glass one didn’t look much like a house to them. When Aldo Celoria began designing a home for his sister in Castel San Pietro, within the Swiss canton of Ticino, he was still a student at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland. Having studied there with such architectural luminaries as Mario Botta, Peter Zumthor, and Kenneth Frampton, he was eager to make a statement with his first built work—but before leaving his mark, he needed to calm down the people across the street.

Set amid vineyards, midway up a stepped hillside, Casa Travella offers sweeping views of the countryside below. Perched above a narrow road, the glass-box structure, crowned by a copper-shingled rectangular volume of nearly identical size, sits over a concrete, street-level garage with a sliding, translucent polycarbonate door. Concrete steps lead to the entry level, where a grassy incline gives way to a flat, black concrete terrace. Minimalist in its landscaping, the house stands within a spare composition of grass and black-pigmented concrete on its 5,370-square-foot lot.

Shortly before designing this project, the architect visited Finland, where he noted numerous copper-clad buildings. On his return, he says, he felt inspired to give Casa Travella a “Nordic” flair. What seems more obvious in his scheme are the studied contrasts between heavy and light, open and closed, bright and dark.

Celoria proudly describes the care he took in opposing the almost voyeuristically transparent ground floor with the nearly opaque upper story. This opposition corresponds to the functions within: While such public or communal spaces as the living, dining, and kitchen areas occupy the lower volume, the more private zone of bedrooms claims the upper block. The base’s glassy smoothness plays against the upper level’s texture of custom-cut copper shingles, each measuring approximately 8 by 10 inches. The ground floor originally had no curtains, accentuating the sheer transparency beneath the more enigmatic second floor. Careful to protect juxtaposed materials, the architect devised a system behind the sheathing for water runoff. To shield the lower level’s anodized aluminum window and door fittings, he placed a thin, continuous, stainless-steel strip at the base of the copper cladding.

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