Casa Lana: The interior as a city
© arcomai I Casa Lana, Triennale di Milano.
At the heart of Triennale Milano, on the first floor, lies one of the museum’s most intimate and surprising environments: Casa Lana, the room‑square that Ettore Sottsass designed in 1965 for his friend, the Milanese printer and lithographer Giovanni Lana. Conceived as a place to work, welcome friends, and display his art collection, it is now a permanent installation — a fragment of domestic architecture that becomes an exhibition device, a study space, and a lens through which to reinterpret the entire Sottsassian universe. Its philological reconstruction is the result of extensive research carried out by the archives, the client’s heirs, and the Triennale Milano restoration laboratory. The operation was made possible thanks to the contribution of Luca Cipelletti (installation) and Christoph Radl (art direction), in collaboration with Studio Sottsass and with the support of Barbara Radice Sottsass.
© arcomai I Casa Lana, Triennale di Milano.
Sottsass imagined this domestic space as “a little square where you walk around and meet people”: not a simple living room, but an urban microcosm, an interior functioning like a small city. At its center stands a wooden volume that originally served simultaneously as wall, wardrobe, and shelving — a habitable island around which functions, paths, and viewpoints unfold. More than a single room, it is an archipelago of distinct yet connected areas, made fluid by a “ring corridor” that circles the core — the square — stitching together the various functional spaces. It is a radical gesture that overturns traditional interior layouts and proposes a collective, dynamic, almost theatrical domesticity: a space conceived for conversation, listening to music, and shared living.
© arcomai I Casa Lana, Domus n. 457
The inner shell of this structure is defined by three sofas designed to encourage conviviality and reflection. The entire environment was punctuated by artworks and furnishings designed by Sottsass himself, including the Rochettone coffee table, created for Poltronova in 1964. The full potential of this device emerges clearly in the article published in Domus no. 457 (1967), “A Room Within a Room”, where the “lived” interior is portrayed as a place capable of transforming into a set, a happening, or a performance — a minimal theatre of everyday life.
© arcomai I Casa Lana, Domus n. 457
Casa Lana sits at the center of the Sala Sottsass, around which a series of temporary exhibitions and events dedicated to Sottsass’s work and thought unfold. Photographs, drawings, objects, architectures, and thematic cycles alternate in a constantly evolving narrative: from the photographic series Design Metaphors to exhibitions devoted to architectural drawing, from visual anthologies such as La Parola to major retrospectives exploring the relationship between structure, color, landscape, and ruin. Each exhibition engages with Casa Lana as if it were a living organism — a gravitational center that attracts and reorganizes Sottsass’s thinking, a laboratory through which to enter and exit in order to grasp the multiple dimensions of his work. This curatorial choice is no coincidence: Casa Lana is not merely an interior, but a manifesto. It expresses the vision of an architect who consistently sought to move beyond function toward meaning, using design as a tool to question rituals, desires, and relationships. It is a place that speaks of community, shared intimacy, and architecture as the construction of possible worlds.
© arcomai I Casa Lana, Triennale di Milano.
The reconstruction of this “room within a room” monumentalizes the house, turning it into a small mausoleum. Entering it means crossing into a suspended time: the warm wood, the soft lighting, and the arrangement of volumes evoke an era in which interior architecture was searching for new forms of sociality and new ways of inhabiting space. And yet the environment feels strikingly contemporary, as if its internal logic had anticipated many of today’s reflections on living, flexibility, and the centrality of experience.
© arcomai I Casa Lana, Triennale di Milano.
Visiting Casa Lana today means stepping into Sottsass’s mental laboratory, observing up close his ability to transform space into narrative and matter into experience. Triennale preserves it as a living organism, capable of generating new readings and new questions. And perhaps this is its most relevant strength: reminding us that architecture is not only form, but a way of imagining how we want to live together. A pity only that one cannot actually sit on the sofas, read a book, and sip tea prepared according to the ritual of Cha‑no‑yu — it would be the perfect measure of its convivial vocation.