PORTA GENOVA DISTRICT IN MILAN
LOCATION Milan, Italy
YEAR 1987
THEME City
STATUS Project for XVII Triennale di Milano 1983-88
DESIGNERS Antonio Monestiroli
TEAM Carlo Moccia, Antonio Paolucci, Ferdinando Pedone, Giacomo Tutucci
We understood the project as research on urban form. The theme was posed from the morphological point of view, without addressing the question of a possible vocation of the area for particular functions, but accepting as positive its functional richness and trying to solve the contradictions present in the urban structure. On the area of the Porta Genova tracks converge parts of the city built at different times and in different ways. To the north, the axis of Via Bergognone belongs to the Masera-Albertini plans, whose expansion found an obstacle in the railroad that marks a containment boundary. To the south the countryside haphazardly occupied over time by different settlements, residential and industrial, located without any orderly criteria that still shows its conformation and contains some of its own elements such as ditches, farmsteads, etc. To the east towards the station square is the nineteenth-century fabric, built neatly on the Navigli and the Darsena.
These three parts of the city converge on the area in question, which must be built in a way that enhances the positive aspects of each. Two urban places, therefore, in which a strong mutation of the fabric takes place, posing as terminals of a system of road axes. Two places that need to be built in such a way as to clearly represent this character of theirs. The curved section along Valenza Street will simply be a link between them. Two large office buildings were assumed to be given the task of defining and representing the identity of the place in which they stand. Trying to determine by extension whether with buildings intended for public or private service industry, it is possible to build formally accomplished places, specific places that make the structure of the modern city recognizable. As an alternative to the hypothesis of business centers. At the end of Via Bergognone four towers connected by a single base define a building that concludes the straight line and overlooks the Naviglio and the countryside beyond. In turn from the rural park this building appears as a boundary of the nineteenth-century city. On the towpath the four towers construct a particular place before and after which the Naviglio has very different formal characters. In the station square a large in-line building occupies the place of the present railway building. It takes up its three-part division by binding itself firmly to the converging form of the three blocks in front. Between the two office buildings, constructed of iron and glass, eleven in-line houses are laid on a single plinth that follows the curve of Valenza Street. These houses destined for the railwaymen. each overlook its own garden connected with the others by two continuous passages that lead on one side to the view of the square, on the other to the Naviglio, the park, and the towers.
IN
Massimo Ferrari (edit by) Antonio Monestiroli Opere, progetti e studi di architettura Electa Milan 2001
Francesco Moschini (edit by) Antonio Monestiroli Progetti 1967-1987
Edizioni Kappa Rome 1988