Piero Lissoni Headquarters

White is the dominant colour: pure white, like grains of sugar or snowflakes which, with the changing of the hours and seasons, turns itself into a soft ivory, or a cold, clear sky-grey, or the blued whiteness of fog. Because white has infinite shadings and gradings: all suitable for this environment, designed to welcome and respect work, protecting and helping the concentration of those who inhabit it daily. This is why this colour has been chosen for the vast, luminous, functionally furnished spaces with wide glassed surfaces which neither hamper the light nor the view.

Situated in Milan, in a small street of the old centre, Studio Lissoni occupies the rooms of a small, early 20th century house which, in the past, was used as a show room for ceramics. Piero Lissoni, architect, designer, graphic artist, shares it with three dogs, a few gold fish and his collaborators - in all thirty young and very young people, coming from every part of the world.

Apart from the inner staircase, which connects the first-floor and ground floor, from the original plan the design has saved the openings onto the courtyard and the inner courtyard, where the brickwork walls have been substituted with large windows.

In inventing this space, Piero Lissoni imagined a sort of compensation chamber, somewhere to help each individual to purify himself, to rid himself of forced sensations and un-asked-for stimulation. In this way there is a definite separation between the outside and the inside. By eliminating every source of sensory stimulation, be it acoustic or visual, only a few, essential elements have been preserved from the outside: light, air and greenery.

Distributed over 850 square metres on two levels, the Studio accommodates, on the first floor, the space for the secretarial and administrative staff, a central space for the graphic artists, a meeting room and Piero Lissoni’s private office, facing onto the luminous internal courtyard, transformed into a small garden.

The ground floor, reached by the staircase, finds the space for the architects, the library-meeting room, the photo-copy room and an enormous laboratory-warehouse. To finish, two resting places, a cafeteria with a kitchen and the gym - to indicate a working idea which is different, when ments of relax complement creativity, as the spaces themselves well demonstrate.

Lissoni & Partners