The Valle House and Studio in Udine is a complex consisting of two adjacent houses, part of a Gothic lot in the historic center of Udine, and including a garden with a third, detached house. The three-story main house, with a total floor area of 470 square meters, is located on the corner of the historic Piazza Primo Maggio—at the foot of Udine’s castle hill—and Via Giovanni da Udine. It is a three-story building with a portico on the corner. The ground floor is occupied by Studio Valle Architetti Associati, while the first and second floors house a primary residence. The core of the house dates back to around 1530, with subsequent 18th- and 19th-century additions, including a garden-facing extension that forms a large 50 square meter terrace on the first floor. The second house, a three-story 18th-century building overlooking Via Giovanni da Udine, has a total floor area of 180 square meters and is internally connected to the main house on all three levels. There are two main staircases: one for the sixteenth-century section, accessible from the portico and connecting all levels to the street; one for the nineteenth-century section, connecting all levels to the street and the internal garden. The garden, located to the south of the two houses and overlooking Piazza Primo Maggio, is a historic space with monumental trees spanning approximately 700 square meters. A detached nineteenth-century two-story house with a total area of 130 square meters opens onto it.
The house appears to have grown as a collection of buildings added over time, gravitating around the garden. In reality, this stratification is only apparent because it is the result of a unified reuse project. The houses and garden were purchased in 1970 by architect Gino Valle, my father, who renovated them, uniting them internally into a single residence on the first and second floors, leaving the ground level for his studio. The garden was landscaped by Ippolito Pizzetti in the 1980s. The main and secondary houses were further renovated in 2017 and are currently occupied by Piera Ricci Menichetti Valle and Pietro Valle, respectively, although they remain internally connected. Pietro Valle owns all the buildings and the garden.
Gino Valle’s renovation freed up partitions and subdivisions, creating a spatially continuous space highlighted by wooden floors and whitewashed walls. The exterior and the restored historic wooden windows and doors are also painted white and form the backdrop to the mural by artist Carlo Ciussi, which emphasizes the presence of the portico overlooking the square. International architectural critics consider the house an example of the reuse of historic heritage, implemented in a period before the rediscovery of historic city centers.
The sense of random growth perceptible throughout the buildings is accentuated by the informality of the interior furnishings, which juxtapose different elements added over time. They are all “affectionate” pieces: historic design objects, modern works of art, individual fragments emerging from family gifts and collectors’ acquisitions. Among them are paintings, tapestries, and sculptures by Lichtenstein, Burri, Afro, Radice, Boetti, Stella, Warhol, Buren, Matta-Clark, Ciussi, Zigaina, Pellis, Buzzati, and Ceroli, as well as prints by Piranesi and Magritte. There are several historic pieces of furniture by Hoffman, D’Aronco, Sello, Terragni, Bertoja, and Giò Ponti.
The archive contains the entire work of architect Gino Valle (1923-2003), considered one of the masters of 20th-century Italian architecture, and of his father Provino Valle (1887-1955), also an architect. Gino Valle’s archive consists of 40,000 original drawings, 1,500 photographs (original prints and negatives by photographers such as Fulvio Roiter, Ugo Mulas, Italo Zannier, Carla de Benedetti, Giovanni Chiaramonte, and Gabriele Basilico), 2,000 slides, and 15,000 historical architectural magazines. Provino Valle’s archive consists of 8,000 drawings and 2,500 original period photos and negatives. Provino and Gino’s library contains approximately 10,000 architectural volumes, including historic editions of treatises by Palladio, Durand, Rondelet, and Letarouilly.
The Valle house, studio, garden, and archive form a unique environmental and settlement ensemble that we intend to preserve in its informal configuration, developed over time.
