No-Mat Architecture – Coliving Tower in Turin

No-Mat Architecture is a coliving tower designed in Turin, Italy, that removes the doormat as the symbolic threshold between public and private life. Conceived by Lorenzo Gaveglio, Giorgio Gandino, and Lorenzo Filippi, the project treats the home not as a sealed unit but as a continuous extension of the city. The name “no-mat” points directly to an architecture without a doormat, devoid of what in traditional living marks the boundary between collective and personal space.

The concept builds on the principles of coliving, where shared kitchens, lounges, and service areas replace the duplicated private rooms of conventional apartments. Housing and public functions are interwoven through the building, which holds several programs connected to the surrounding urban fabric. By including an attractive draw such as a cinema, the project opens itself to the city and becomes a dynamic place of encounter and exchange at different scales.

The Tower Against the Mat

The name also refers to the chosen architectural typology, the tower, which sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from the “mat building,” a low and widespread structure that spreads across the territory by raising only one or a few floors above the ground. Concentrating the volume in a portion of the plot stems from a clear intention, to free up the ground and give the city a system of squares designed in relation to the public space around them. This trade between vertical density and open ground is one of the oldest negotiations in tower design, where every floor gained in height returns surface area to the street.

Housing towers carry their own discipline. Vertical circulation, structural stability, daylight, and the need to keep shared floors socially active all shape how a residential high-rise behaves. By placing collective life at the heart of the section rather than at its edges, the Turin proposal tests whether a tower can feel as open and porous as a ground-level neighborhood. In the wider story of Turin and its dense post-industrial blocks, a building that gives squares back to the city reads as a quiet argument about what density should offer in return. No-Mat Architecture leaves that question open, inviting the city to step across a threshold that is no longer there.