Art and food are two parts of the same concept of culture. Today, you can find them together at the Pinacoteca di Brera of Milan, which houses the new Caffè Fernanda designed by RGAStudio and dedicated to Fernanda Wittgens, the visionary director who reopened the gallery in 1950, after the World War II.
The café is part of a larger project to redesign the museum and its collection: located in the main entrance and perfectly integrated into the historical building, it is designed to have chromatic and material coherence with the gallery’s new layout and its reinterpretation of the space’s 1950s architecture.
The architects accurately selected colours and materials: the intense petrol blue of the walls complement the warm hues of the gallery rooms and offset the artwork exhibited in the café while the large, round-edged bar evokes ribbed wooden furniture from the ’50s with inverted proportions: enlarged, semi-circular strips of Canaletto walnut, topped by a thin, antique-brass surface; the same brass, thinned even further, also frames the large mirror, and the tables are also made of brass and walnut.
In addition, adjustable LED projectors are mounted on rails to mimic the pattern of the existing plaster beams and serve as the sole source of light; on the other hand, the prominent features of Piero Portaluppi’s previous design, the beautiful Peach-Blossom marble floors and the Lepanto-Red frames, have been recovered and restored in the new project.
Because past and present can coexist harmoniously.
