Die Moderne in Milano
Full-day tour
The first work of Giovanni Muzio marks both the end and the beginning of an architectural style. It is configured as a block but is actually made up of distinct parts. The character of abstraction of his fronts, conceived as a collage of independent parts, shows the richness of the language and represents a taxonomy of different elements .Cà Brutta means „Ugly House“, so renamed in the twenties as if it wasn’t part of the city.
Projects by: Giovanni Muzio
The building designed in 1936 expresses the principles already set forth in the pages of the magazine Domus by Gio Ponti, who was the editor. „Architecture is a crystal“, a pure volume, evidenced by the coplanarity of walls and windows, in which the city is reflected. The modern shape of this building has its own disposition related to views and light but it is also able to establish clear relationships with the city fulfilling the front of Largo Donegani and the front on the main road. The headquarters of Montecatini is a real architectural revolution.
Projects by: Giò Ponti
Year: 2010-2018
The house designed by Giuseppe Terragni combines the principles of the rationalism with the specific character of Milan. The two parallel bodies, perpendicular to Corso Sempione, define the block thanks to suspended terraces between the two buildings. The side of the building, clad in white marble and plaster, shows its structural system. The building ends with an unique apartment, designed in order to have the living area on one body and the sleeping area on the other, with a garden on the roof.
Projects by: Giuseppe Terragni e Pietro Lingeri
Symbol of Milan and of the industrial rebirth of the city after the bombing of World War II, the Pirelli skyscraper, with its 127 meters, is the tallest building in Milan throughout the twentieth century. Built of reinforced concrete, a typical material of the Italian culture but unusual for a skyscraper, expresses the city that grows in height and the trasformation of Milan in a tertiary city.
Projects by: Giò Ponti e Pier Luigi Nervi
A 203 metre long and 30 metre wide glass box, hanging from a reinforced concrete colonnade formed by giant tapered pillars and parabolic arches, contrasts with two low, sinuous bodies that cross it, emerging from a large artificial lake. The complex, of extraordinary expressive and plastic effectiveness, was commissioned at the end of the 1960s by Giorgio Mondadori to the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer1 to create „(…) a spectacular location that would characterise the publishing house“.
Project: by Osacr Niemeyer
The desire to create a real modern building convinced Luigi Moretti to deny the rules of nineteenth-century, both in shape and language. The orthogonal arrangement of the large volume overhanging the road, the facade design as a solid surface in which the traditional windows are replaced by free cuts, the full body that dominates and distorts the basement made by glass, are some of the new architectural codes operated by Moretti for a new style in architecture.
Projects by: Luigi Moretti
Caccia Dominioni proposes a building that stands out the anonymous context that surrounds it, through a careful work of recomposition of façades using the elements of his linguistic repertory: the windows of variable size depending on the destination of the environments, the different sliding or roller shutters, black glasses to house them, the desire to compose the façade and hide the texture of the pillars. The four fronts, perceived from the outside as the house is located on an isolated lot, they are all different in form and composition, and it’s not easy to understand which is the main one.
Projects by: Luigi Caccia Dominoni
The complex Monte Amiata, also known as Gallaratese, is composed by two different expressions of the utopic thinking of this ages (1968). Both based on typological issues, the Aldo Rossi building is a poetical reinterpretation of the rationalist linear buildings, while the Aldo Aymonino one is a megastructural union of different typologies in one building. The common spaces anticipats the postmodern spirit.
Projects by: Aldo Rossi, Carlo Aymonino