meta-Morphosis: An open building strategy for the conversion of the Ligresti's towers in Milan by MargheritaFBonanomi

meta-Morphosis An open building strategy for the conversion of the Ligresti's towers in Milan

Students Margherita Furia Bonanomi | 903941 Enrico Robin | 903748 Supervisor Gennaro Postiglione Co-supervisor Barbara Brollo

Politecnico di Milano Scuola AUIC Master Degree Thesis in Architecture a.y. 2020 | 2021 Faculty of Architecture, Urban Planning and Construction MSc Programme “Architecture-Built Environment-Interiors”

Metamorphosis noun From ancient Greek μεταμόρφωσις (derives from μεταμορϕόω "to transform") Term that means transformation “(..) of one object into another”. A complete change of character, appearance, or condition, a showy and radical modification.

Table of contents Abstract

PART I - The Office 1. The idea of Office

1.1 Origins of the office 1.2 The evolution of office design 1.3 What will be the future of offices? 2. The Milanese office panorama

2.1 The urban evolution of the tertiary sector 2.2 The postwar Milanese offices 2.2 Noteworthy examples 3. High-rise Milan

3.1 A brief history 3.2 A comparison between the 60s and 90s 3.3 New buildings and heritage 4. The Milanese speculative model 4.1 Focus on Ligresti’s investments 4.2 The chance given by the heritage

125

PART II - Milan 2020 - 2050 4. Milan today

159

4.1 The population in movement: demography 4.2 Housing situation 4.3 Development scenarios and housing demand 5. PGT 2030

169

6.1 Accessibility + viability: today - 2030 6.2 Green area: today - 2030 6.3 Renewal and regeneration area 2030

PART III - From office to home 6. Transforming the abandoned office buildings

183

6.1 Some international examples 7. Drivers of the conversion

120

7.1 Recap

PART IV - Stephenson area 8. The site: Stephenson area

231

8.1 The development of the site 8.2 Maps storytelling of the area: 2000 to 2030 9. The five towers 9.1 Concrete and flows

253

9.2 (Im)permeability 9.3 The facade 9.4 Typical floor plan

PART V - The meta-project 10. Methodology 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7

275

Modular off-site construction Key points of the strategy Materials Service pods Facade cladding system Transformation process Floor plans

12. New urban body

307

12.1 Possible services and functions 12.2 Masterplan key points 12.3 Conclusion

329

Bibliography and sources

333

Image index

338

Abstract

Concrete parallelepipeds of about 12 floors high, with a not very slender figure, covered with mirrored glass windows, always with an external compartment emergency staircase: this are the Ligresti Towers, characterized by an unmistakable architectural composition they are the result of the economic speculation of the "Milano da bere"1 from the 80s/90s. The towers, a sort of automatic/standard architecture, a symbol of wrong planning, which today have almost become a landmark, have spread widely throughout the Milanese area. Located at the entrances of the city today they become obsolete and decaying buildings, often partially or completely abandoned. The reasons for the failure of these buildings are different: the low building quality, the random location within industrial areas, and the poor accessibility.

[1] "Milano da bere" is a journalistic expression that was born to indicate the Milanese social life in the 1980s. It is often used jokingly to indicate an idea of vivacity and modernity that was associated with the city at that time, but also its superficiality, individualism, and even dishonesty. The cliché was summed up by an advertising spot for Amaro Ramazzotti, one of the most famous bitters produced in Lombardy, whose ending said: "Milan, the city of Amaro Ramazzotti, the bitter of those who live and work [...], that was born here and that still today brings this Milan to live, to dream, to enjoy everywhere. This Milan ... to drink. " www.ilpost.it

The "Milan in movement" of nowadays must therefore deal with the heritage left by the Eighties. So the question is: instead of demolishing them, why not reprogram them? We must react and transform our city into something better and sustainable, we must find new paths and new solutions for its future. The transformation of an abandoned or disused office building into a home is confirmed as a highly strategic opportunity for the contemporary city, which on the one hand can try to solve an emerging problem and at the same time respond to a housing demand that is not reflected in the current offer. Starting from this point, we intend to develop a practice where, considering the drivers, risks, and criteria, the sporadic conversion of offices can be transformed into a strategy to be applied on a large scale. A common practice that serves as a guideline for the conversion of the Ligresti Towers into small and medium-sized homes, able at the same time to respond to the urgent housing demand for affordable housing and to solve the weaknesses of the outgoing situation in these building. Thanks to advanced technologies and a defined strategic process, the meta-project wants to act as a replicable process that could be applied to all areas of Milan where the Ligresti towers are located, to give these buildings a second chance. In particular, the meta-project was developed in the Stephenson district, an area located in the north-west of Milan. Thispart of the city is going to be a place of change, thank's to the transformation of the PGT 2030 and therefore this will be a place with big possibilities of change.

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Paralleleppedi di cemento alti circa 12 piani, dalla figura poco slanciata, ricoperti di vetrate a specchio, sempre accostate da una scala esterna di emergenza: sono le Torri Ligresti, caratterizzate da un'inconfondibile composizione architettonica, risultato della speculazione economica della "Milano da bere" degli anni '80/'90. Le torri, una sorta di architettura automatica/standard, simbolo di una pianificazione sbagliata, che sono diventate oggi quasi un landmark, si sono diffuse in maniera capillare nel territorio milanese. Localizzate agli ingressi della città oggi risultano essere oramai edifici obsoleti e fatiscenti, spesso parzialmente o completamente abbandonati. Le ragioni dell'insuccesso di questi edifici sono diverse: la bassa qualità edilizia, la localizzazione casuale all 'interno di queste aree industriali, e la scarsa accessibilità. La Milano "in movimento" di oggi deve dunque fare i conti con l'eredità lasciata dagli anni Ottanta. Quindi la domanda è: invece di demolirli, perché non riprogrammarli? Dobbiamo reagire e trasformare la nostra città in qualcosa di migliore e sostenibile, dobbiamo trovare nuove strade e nuove soluzioni per il suo futuro. La trasformazione in abitazioni di un edificio per uffici dismesso o abbandonato, si conferma un'opportunità altamente strategica per la città contemporanea, che da un lato può cercare di risolvere un problema emergente e allo stesso tempo rispondere ad una domanda abitativa che non trova riscontro nell'offerta attuale. Partendo da questo punto si intende sviluppare una pratica, dove considerando i driver, i rischi e i criteri si possa trasformare la sporadica conversione degli uffici in una strategia da applicare su larga scala. Una pratica comune che funge da linea guida per la conversione delle Torri Ligresti in abitazioni di piccole e medie dimensioni, in grado di rispondere all'urgente domanda abitativa di alloggi a prezzi accessibili e risolvere i punti deboli della situazione attuale. Grazie all'utilizzo di tecnologie avanzate e ad un processo strategico ben definito, il meta-progetto vuole agire come un processo replicabile che potrebbe essere applicato a tutte le zone di Milano dove si trovano le torri Ligresti, per dare a questi edifici una seconda possibilità. In particolare, il meta-progetto è stato sviluppato nel quartiere di Stephenson, un'area situata a nord-ovest di Milano. Questa parte di città sarà un luogo di cambiamenti grazie alla trasformazione programmate del PGT 2030. Sarà quindi un quartiere con grandi possibilità di cambiamento.

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PART I The Office

Over the years, the office design process has become a cultured process, which has developed in an attempt to organize workplaces in an efficient and functional way. A sort of humanism has developed: designers and architects organize environments to promote productivity, creativity, and well-being. In this chapter, we have briefly reported the history of office design, trying to understand how it has evolved over time.

1. The idea of Office

Since its first appearance, the office building has been one of the great icons within cities. In the 20th century, office towers consistently dominate the skylines of every continent as they are the most tangible index of economic activity, representing both social, technological and financial progress, thus symbolizing architectural progress in every city. Nowadays, the era of modern technology, the way we work has evolved along with our habits and technologies, so the spaces we work in have also changed over time. The history of offices shows how our work has changed, but also how physical spaces respond to cultural, technological and social forces. Today with laptops, tablets and mobile phones we can work effectively and efficiently from anywhere, we only need a simple Wi-Fi connection, and so our workplaces multiply within the constantly moving city. Many of us spend more time in an office than ever, seeing more bosses and colleagues than our families. The office is our second home and its structure and design can have very real consequences for our productivity, happiness and well-being. This is why great office design is so important. Taking a look at the recent history of offices and we can see a natural evolution in design that reflects changes in more ways than our work processes; there are changes in our culture, economic growth, technology and fashion. Over time, the emphasis of office design has shifted from simple worker productivity to creating many types of office space as we understand them. Employee health, happiness, creativity and stress levels have become real concerns for employers, interior designers, and architects. The result has led over the years to radical changes in the shape, purpose and design of the workplace; with this section dedicated to office spaces, we want to highlight the main types of offices that have occurred over the course of history.

[image 01] opposite page: Atrium of the Larking Administration Building by Frank Lloyd Wright, 1906.

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The idea of Office

Origins of the office

Offices have existed in some way, shape or form throughout history as a means for a person, or group of people, to conduct official administrative affairs. The origins of the modern office lie in large-scale organizations such as governments, commercial corporations, and religious orders that required written records or documents. According to market experts, the building intended to house offices appeared in the 1950s. For architectural historians, however, this appearance dates back to even more ancient times. There is evidence that suggests that the first offices originated in ancient Rome as spaces where official work took place and that similar spaces existed in some form in the course of the centuries. The origin of the term office is in fact based on the Latin term officium, which indicates 'duty, office, function', derived in turn from opus, 'work', and facĕre, 'do'. In ancient Rome, therefore, the term was not so much a place or a specific building, but the people within it. To better carry out the central bureaucratic processes, the Romans built important architecture such as the archaic Pantheon, in the modern business district of Rome, using time-tested construction techniques that inspired organization and order. It should not be forgotten that similar spaces have existed in different forms over the centuries, another example is medieval monks who worked in quiet spaces designed specifically for sedentary activities such as copying and studying manuscripts. These early "workstations" included a desk, chair and shelves and we can see them depicted in Sandro Botticelli's paintings depicting St. Augustine while studying. One of these paintings is now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, which was originally built as the central administrative building of the Medici merchant empire in 1560. It was therefore an early version of the modern corporate office; it was also both a workplace and a visible declaration of prestige and power. The office has therefore existed throughout history in one form or another as an administrative addition to the centralized power of the state. Notable examples are the aforementioned Palazzo degli Uffizi dei Medici in Florence or the Bank of England. However, these spaces were rare in those days, because most of the population worked from home.

[image 02] Bank of England, John Soane, 1818-23.

[image 03] opposite page: St Augustine at Work, Sandro Botticelli, 1480.

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It was the 17th century that marked a turning point, at that time in fact many professionals began working from offices in London, Paris and Amsterdam. This led to a cultural distinction between the office, associated with the sphere of work, and the home, associated with comfort, privacy and intimacy. However, it will be necessary to wait until the 18th century to have buildings with rooms and spaces reserved exclusively for offices, in the modern sense of the term. With the expansion of the British Empire and engagement in an increasing level of trade with other parts of the empire (and the world), organizations such as the Royal Navy and the East India Company were established to further the interests of Britain overseas and to manage their incredibly varied tasks and organization, it was necessary to build a central base of operations. One of the earliest known purpose built office buildings was The Old Admiralty Office built in 1726 in London. It served to manage the mass of documents generated by the Royal Navy and included meeting spaces and the Admiralty meeting room, which is still used today. This was quickly followed in 1729 by the construction of the East India House on Leadenhall Street in London, which served as the headquarters from which the East India Trading Company centrally administered its Indian interests and required thousands of employees to process the necessary paperwork. Many nonpolitical organizations followed suit, such as John Soane's Four Percent Office in the Bank of England, erected in 1793. By now, the advent of a centralized and concentrated space for administering [image 04] The Admiralty's Old Building, now known as the Ripley Building, built 1726 in Whitehall.

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The idea of Office

increasing amounts of paperwork had taken hold, with new offices popping up all over London. The first "skyscraper" in the UK, by definition, was the Oriel Chambers 1, built for Reverend Thomas Anderson west of Liverpool near the River Mersey. Completed in 1864 by architect and engineer Peter Ellis, the "skyscraper" measures just five floors and is the first building in history to feature a glass curtain wall with a metal frame. While not a "skyscraper" by today's standards, it was one of the first office buildings to use an iron structure, which allowed the iconic glass curtain wall to flood all floors of the building with natural light during the day. and more people to use more office space with minimal need for artificial light. Its innovative design had a significant influence on office buildings around the world, inspiring John Root's first Chicago skyscrapers and giving rise to the iconic 20th century skyscrapers of Chicago and New York, shaping the skylines of the cities we know today. Many factors of different nature gave rise to the modern offices of the early 20th century. The emergence of new inventions such as electric lighting that allowed employees to work without expensive gas lights or many windows. Typewriters and computing machines that allowed the processing of large amounts of information. The telegraph and later the telephone, which allowed office buildings to be placed away from factories or homes, while maintaining control over them. All of this has brought, literally, over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, to increasingly specialized office projects, from Chicago and New York office towers to post-war suburban corporate campuses, which strengthened a distinction between work and home. Furthermore, the advent of skyscrapers has enabled more than ten times the workforce to work on the same square meters of increasingly expensive land. The industrial revolution had completely modernized manual labor and manufacturing. The rapid evolution of office design at the beginning of the twentieth century has led over time to the increasing complexity of the design of these work environments. Thanks to new solutions and ideas, the increasingly numerous workforce could be moved to large open space offices, working with natural light.

[1] - The Telegraph's architecture critic Ellis Woodman picked the structures that define the nation and noted Oriel Chambers as being: "one of only two known buildings by its architect, this office block was hated in its day but later lauded as an precursor to Modernism. Its slender cast-iron frame is faced in stone and interposed with projecting oriel windows, each just wide enough to accommodate a desk."

[image 05] - Oriel Chambers in Liverpool, England, 1864, the world's first building featuring a metal framed glass curtain wall.

Over time, the design of these work environments has become increasingly complex, designed to promote not only productivity and efficiency but also creativity and well-being of the individual. The traditional fixed and layered office has therefore evolved and is still evolving to embrace new, more intuitive and fluid ways of working.

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The idea of Office

The evolution of office design

Taylorism and the rise of the open plan office The growth and change in the nature of office work had a great impact on the design of office buildings. While previously offices were located inside small residential buildings, they now became so-called "white collar 1 factories" with flexible floor plans. The main model, both in organization and in workspaces, came from America. The production-line of much American office work resulted in the work-pool arrangement clerical workers lined up in rows in large rooms. In the 1920s, the workspace in America was heavily influenced by the ideas of Frederick Taylor 2. Taylor took a scientific look at work processes and found ways to maximize their efficiency by dividing the process into a series of segments repetitive. This way of working initially applied to industry, began to spread also in office work, especially when "Information Technology" (typewriters, calculators and telephones) invaded the working environment. Taylor's ideas were translated into the workspace through the design of "open plan" spaces, with the tables arranged in an orthogonal way, oriented in the same direction, that of the supervisor. The absence of divisions between the spaces had to facilitate the exchange of information, the flow of work from one table to another, and maximize the visual control by the head of the office. Mail-order firms, insurance companies and government agencies followed the Taylorist principles of splittinf tasks into specific repetitive acts. Is was Sullivan's ex-employee, Frank Lloyd Wright, who firts attempted to temper these hatsh conditions. He had by this time developed his own visionary position. The Larkin Administration Building of 1903-1905 in Buffalo, New York, was designed by Wright for a mail order soap company of 1.800 workers, and can be considerd the first purpose designed enviroment for a specific organzation. The cliff-like brick building was innovative in plan with all service spaces pulled to the corners leaving a large open space at the centre. Wright's attention to detail extended to the design of the steel furniture, the first "system" furniture and the built-in cabinets that lined the walls. The size, layout and technology of this building marked the beginning of the modern corporate office. This building served as a reference for the comfort standards of the time as it used air conditioning and skylights to bring natural light and air into the space.

[1] - A white collar worker is a person who performs professional, desk, managerial, or administrative work. White-collar work may be performed in an office or other administrative setting. [2] -Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), the American scholar who developed the method of scientific organization of work called taylorism between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He hypothesized a mechanization of construction processes also in the building field.

[image 06] John V. A. Weaver, King Vidor. The Crowd. 1928

[image 07] opposite page: Photo of Larkin Administration Building. opposite page: Floor plan of the Larkin Administration Building, design by Frank Lloyd Wright, Buffalo, New York, 1903-1905.

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The idea of Office

Streamlined office plan After the costruction of skyscrapers of Chicago and New York, throughout the first 30 years of the 20th Century many European countries saw a rise in “miniature skyscrapers,” as well as “Taylorist offices” 3 . Having developed solutions to the problems of organisation and manufacture, the 1930s saw American companied becoming interested in more efficient working enviroments and buildings that could express their corporate image. The work conducted by Frank Lloyd Wright still remains fundamental in the design of the workplace as a specific disciplinary area, linked to the interdependence of the interior with the architecture of the building envelope intended to host tertiary work. The design of the American-style workspace and Taylorian ideology left a strong mark on the design of the European workspace. The new ideas spread through magazines, books and fairs. With the development of skyscrapers the workplace changed to become a spacious space where there was a mix of private offices and open space workstations, complete with typewriters and, in some cases, a kitchen or canteen for dedicated staff. This evolution was embodied by the opening of the open-plan office of The Johnson Wax company 4, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939, which displayed a Taylorism softened by more human values. Workers were isolated from the unsympathetic industrial surroundings within a great space supported by slender mushwoom columns and lit from above. The great work room, with its rich warm spaces, with radiand materials and form were intended to compendate for the lack of view and contact with the outside world. The main differences the Taylorist predecessors were the presence of bright lights, clinical, white, warm spaces, and cork ceilings. The Johnson Wax building created a sensation when it opened and it is still in use today by the same company, admired as one of the masterpieces of 1930s architecture. With the modern design office, new trends were born. Among these there was the idea that the office design should reflect the image of the company. In fact, in the common vision, the company was centered on strength and masculinity. But in the some time, major world-changing events, such as World War II (and the Great Depression in the United States) represented huge obstacles on the path to progress. The Streamlined Office was a work of Taylorist design but definitely improved and updated by the extravagance of the 20s and the invention of new, premium materials.

[3] - Architects like Mies van der Rohe designed in this period concrete office buildings with continuous ribbon windows, above head height, to let in light but not allow employees to see out from their desks. These designs still utilised the Taylorist principles, but due to wider emphasis placed on natural light sources, the Taylorist open plan had to change or improve. [4] - The Johnson Wax Administration Building by Frank Lloyd is one of the first examples of office contract, with innovative furnishings resulting from the collaboration of the architect with Metal Office Furniture Co. For Wright, the Johnson Wax Administration Building represents "an experiment in design and construction": an introverted building with curved shapes, externally covered by a continuous brick surface, lightened by the use of Pyrex glass tubes that make the interiors radiate from a diffused light, while not allowing the view of the outside.

[image 08] opposite page: Photo of the Johnson-Wax Administration Building. opposite page: Floor plan of the JohnsonWax Administration Building, designed by F. L. Wright in 1939.

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The idea of Office

Open plan office The advent of the 1950s led to numerous further progress within office buildings, thanks to the use of modern materials such as steel and glass. The intelligent architecture of the international modern movement has had a worldwide influence, adopted as a new corporate business image. Thanks to the widespread use of air-conditioning and fluorescent lighting, the skyscrapers had very little need for light and natural ventilation. The new developments brought the office building to become completely independent from the outside world. This also made it possible to create wider and more open-plan floors, where workers could be placed independently. The economic return was more important than the aesthetic value in the design of deep and uninterrupted floors. In addition to being cheap, these office buildings were easy to subdivide and without difficult "corners" to rent. For the employees, however, little had improved. The Open Plan Office, with the construction of commercial buildings and skyscrapers, has begun to combine private offices with large open spaces, occasionally with additional rooms such as kitchens, pantries, and canteens.

[5] - Peter Ellis designed Oriel Chambers in 1864 on the corner of Water Street and Covent Garden in Liverpool. It is considered by many architectural historians to be one of the most influential buildings of his age, a precursor of the modernist style in architecture and one of the earliest attempts at break with the classic tradition of commercial architecture

In the 1950s, this tradition received new input from new construction techniques and new architectural ideas. These developments and innovations have led to the birth of iconic examples within the architectural landscape such as The Lever House, completed in 1952 in New York City. Home to the British soap company Lever Brothers, it was the first skyscraper in New York to re-propose the "curtain wall of glass" from Peter Ellis's Oriel Chambers 5. This iconic image of a "glass box" in the 1950s and 1960s sparked a series within the New York skyline. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, following the Lever House, designed the Chase Manhattan Bank, which was finished in 1961. This 60-story building had the standard steel frame and the much loved and used glass facade, which was much used by the "modernists" for its continuity and lightness. American glass boxes were also highly advertised in Europe. The new ideas found fertile ground in the opportunity to rebuild the various war-torn cities. However, the scale of office buildings in Europe remained smaller than that of the American counterpart. Until the mid-20th century, the offices of this open style had undoubtedly been inventions, revisions, and reinventions of an economic nature, however, this was about to change.

[image 09] The Lever House in New York designed by Gordon Bunshaft in 1952.

[image 10] opposite page: Photo of the interiors of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. opposite page: Floor plan of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in 1961.

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The idea of Office

Office-landscape In the decade of the 1960s, Europe took America's place in the design of the workspace. As reflective glass skyscrapers were replicated throughout, a German consultancy group, the Quickborner Teams6, worked on new workspace concepts. The arguments developed by the team are still valid today and used in promoting new solutions. As a first point they emphasized the importance of communication, and of human relationships in work. The second point was about flexibility; the workspaces had to be adaptable to rapid changes in the organization without interrupting, as far as possible, the activities in progress. The third mentioned the increasing importance of Information Technology, which then consisted of computers as large as rooms, which were expected to take over all routine activities. The design of the office became more democratic and layouts that looked at the interaction and human involvement of employees began to be designed. This style of office design became known as Bürolandschaft, or "office-landscape", an originally German concept which after becoming popular in Northern Europe began to spread around the world. In terms of size and technology, this concept was inspired by American offices: large, open spaces with air conditioning. The architecture of the interior, on the other hand, was inspired by ideas far from the cold and the cutting efficiency of the American "open space". The workspace was seen as a shell where interactive processes took place. Inside, communication had to flow freely without being stopped or diverted by walls and doors. As a result, there were no private offices, no rooms of any kind, and the furniture and equipment seemed to have been randomly placed. The employees were all in the same space; the hierarchical order was eliminated!

[6] - The Quickborner consulting group was established by two brothers, Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle, who had previously been working as assistants in their father’s furniture studio. Upon founding Quickborner outside of Hamburg as a space planning firm, the two brothers soon developed an interest in office space. They sought to “break the rigid and ineffective structures of large bureaucratic organizations open, and design the spatial organization of the office in line with the needs of workers.”

[image 11] Example of an office based on the principles of Bürolandschaft.

With the Bürolandschaft, the workplace has become a more open space with workstations and work islands grouped, in a less scientific way than Taylorism. The office as landscape represented a good solution also from the user's point of view, with large spaces, rest areas available, the new model was immediately well accepted. Though Bürolandschaft enjoyed a brief period of popularity in Europe, as well as being established within some British offices by the end of the 1960s, the sheer nature of its open, scattered, and charmingly random layout did not lend itself well to worldwide adoption. “Action Furniture” was developed to adapt the desk to this new office environment, mitigate noise, and address concerns of privacy – but this ultimately ended up undermining the idea behind Bürolandschaft.

[image 12] opposite page: Photo of the Osram Office in Munich, designed by Quickborner in 1963. opposite page: Floor plan of the Osram Office in Munich, designed by Quickborner in 1963.

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The idea of Office

Herman Miller and the action office During the 1970s, the popularity of the office as a landscape dropped dramatically across Europe. We are in a context of economic difficulties due to the 1973 oil crisis. As a result, the costs of heating and lighting the large spaces of the 1960s become unsustainable. It was in this period that the European workspace project began to differentiate itself in the UK and Continental Europe. Designers began experimenting with new types of workspaces, driven by different motives and in different directions. From the socio-democratic principles of Bürolandschaft the Herman Miller's action office was born, a new type of office adapted to new needs, called the action office, was born. This included large spaces, with a series of desks, work spaces and rows of modular furniture, possibly fitted with dividers, designed to allow freedom of movement and flexibility to work in a position suitable for the job being done. This current can be seen as the first noteworthy example based on post-war European modernist principles. Action Office 7 was initially designed on the basis of small offices, where the staff worked in the same room, on the same furniture, this led to problems. Because the custom-made furniture from high-quality materials was too expensive for office managers, as well as difficult to assemble. This, coupled with the need to replace furniture with changing office needs, has made it financially and virtually unsuitable for larger corporate offices. The most radical reaction came from Sweden where it was common practice to equip each employee with a private space with individual climate control, natural light and an outside view. Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger, influenced by the ethnic anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, developed a kind of structuralist architecture in those years. In 1972 he proposed an innovative project for the establishment of the insurance company Centraal Beheer in Apeldoorn, in the Netherlands. The human dimension was the key word for the development of the project. The project stems from the following concept: "employees must feel part of the community of workers but without getting lost in the crowd". The architectural idea was to create a small village made up of units, of 8-10 people, connected by walkways, with an atrium and common areas. The building is a deep spatial matrix of concrete and blocks arranged on a Scottish grid. The platforms separated by light wells allow light to filter through the center of the floor. In steps similar to the predecessors of his Action Office and Bürolandschaft, the uniformity of these smaller, repetitive spaces allowed small groups of 10 to occupy them simultaneously, collaborating in mechanically structured work environments.

[7] - Action Office was developed and marketed under the supervision of George Nelson and Robert Propst, who were among the first designers to argue that office work was mental work and that mental effort was linked to a proper work environment.

[image 13] Example of an office based on the principles of Action Office.

[image 14] opposite page: Photo of the Central Beheer in Apeldoorn by Herman Hertzberger in 1970. opposite page: Floor plan of the Central Beheer in Apeldoorn (NL), designed by Herman Hertzberger in 1970.

meta-Morphosis

The idea of Office

The cubicle farm The reality of Cubicle Farms arose as a result of the Action Office of the 1960s, when human resources departments, senior managers and administrators were less interested in the well-being of their workers than they were in their own. profitability. This type of office organization was based on the based on the development of the Action Office model but the principle was that workers had to have their own space, but in the most economical and flexible way possible. Douglas Ball, a designer for Haworth, one of Herman Miller's rival furniture companies, developed one of Action Office II's many knockoff models. Initially excited, what arose was a completely depressed space. “I went to see the first installation of the system, a huge government project. The panels were all seventy inches tall, so unless you were six feet tall you couldn't look any further. It was terrible, one of the worst installations I've ever seen” Ball said. Cubicle Farm is a history lesson that further demonstrates that any good idea can be corrupted by anyone with more interest in the economy, or created, than in human resources.

Euro Stakeholder office In this time deep expanses of air-conditioned and artificially lit office space seemed less sustainable and the difficulty some found in adapting to open office environments resulted in its call from fashion. The increasing involvement of the employee in corporate decision-making resulted in workers councils that become influential in the design of the working environment. Countries such as Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands adopted regulations that governed space standards per employee and demanded access to views, daylight and openable windows. As office workers became more enfranchised this control extended to the actual organisation and ownership of companies, many opting to give their employees the opportunity to become stakeholders. The result of this development is the model that remains dominant today for Continental European offices. New office buildings follow the general pattern of narrow buildings of cellular offices arranged along a central corridor. The result of well meaning but inflexible regulations is that many office environments do not express the culture of their organisations in a positive and integrated. Recent attempts to create a more public realm in the European office have taken the form of cellular offices with public “streets” with cafes and relaxation area such as the Stockholm SAS building by Niels Torp of 1987. The ‘combi-office’ invented by the Swedish practice Tengbom combines cellular offices on the exterior of a building with a common space for employees and services in the centre.

[image 15] Steven Lisberger. Tron. 1982

[image 16] Example of an office based on the cubicle farm principles.

[image 17] opposite page: Photo of the SAS offices in Stockholm, designed by Niels Torp in 1988. opposite page: Floor plan of the SAS offices in Stockholm, designed by Niels Torp in 1988.

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The idea of Office

The casual office and the virtual office In the early 1990s, the demand for new office buildings began to decline due to a slowdown in economic activity. At the same time, new ideas emerged about what the workspace should be like. These ideas are based on changes in information technology in relation to developments in organizations. With mobile phones, personal computers (hardware), the Internet and e-mail (software), employees have become "free" in time and space. Information Technology has changed the conception of work and its organization. According to the new organizational theories, all the conventions concerning the work and the organization of the same, can be questioned. The utopian ideas of the 80's on people who worked "at home" finally seem a realistic option. In the office, employees are invited to share workstations, this is made possible by internal networks and electronic archives, thus offering maximum flexibility at each workstation. The integration and adoption of "work space alternatives" varies from country to country. The dominant idea of the workspace of the 90's is that employees move around the interior of the building, using the different workstations designed specifically for the various specialized activities. The new spaces are conceived on the basis of these recent organizational needs, integrating the increasingly emerging parameters of comfort and the regulation of natural principles. The environment thus becomes the planning horizon of the offices of today and those of the future. Hot-desking8 and Teleworking9 became constant features of virtual office concept. The new millennium brought a new ideas, companies realized that employees did not need to be in the office every day of the week at all. The use of the Internet, laptops and mobile phones brought to the idea that work could become more mobile and move from the office to the café or at home. Moreover companies realized that the increased attention to employee morale leads to an increase in the level of productivity. The new ideologies of office design therefore, tested on these new principles, changed the boundary between work and social life. Work and leisure combined to create a unique environment that improved the quality of life and work of employees. The creative companies therefore lost their corporate appearance to fill the environments with warm and vibrant colors, game tables and sometimes sports fields.A parallel trend in office design is the casual office pioneered by Silicon Valley software firms in the eighties, which encourages highly personalised workspaces suited to long hours spent programming. The "dress code" of such an office become much more relaxed that a concentional office. Many have started to become 24 hours to enable more flexible matterns.

[8] - Hot-desking is a new way of saving office space in which workers do not have their own desk and are only given a desk when they need it. This has saved space and money and promoted a more flexible working environment. All these new advances in office design have sought to completely change the organization's working culture. [9] - Teleworking is a type of work that does not require the physical presence of the worker in the office or in the company and is facilitated by the use of IT and telematic tools, as well as flexibility in the organization of schedules and methods of carrying out them.

[image 18] Photo of the TBWA\Chiat\Day designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects in 1998.

opposite page: Floor plan of the TBWA\ Chiat\Day in Los Angeles, designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects in 1998. Floor plan of the Headquarter Interpolis in Tilburg, designed by Abe Bonnema in 1995.

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The idea of Office

Home and office We have reached a point in history where office design has reached a saturation point; increasingly inspired by the home environment, thanks to the use of warm colors, intimate lighting and comfortable seating, it continues to focus more and more on people's comfort and well-being. While therefore the presence of the office world decreases but still remains alive, we have the appearance of new workspaces such as co-working. We see the growth of co-working spaces that offer flexibility and modern conveniences, while housing different types of businesses. Co-working 10 is a new way of thinking about the office and office furniture. It is a workspace shared with other people, within an equipped and organized structure, by freelancers who maintain an independent activity. You don't just share the office and work environment, you also share ideas with people who are not part of the same company or organization. WeWork is one of the largest providers of ultramodern office spaces for numerous companies and individuals around the world. Flexible buildings are born in the cities that facilitate the work done outside the company, in shared spaces designed specifically. Today, however, thanks to online connectivity, laptops, more and more people could potentially work from home. This is one of the reasons why many office buildings have been abandoned or are no longer fully used, the main reason is that they no longer meet the needs of today and contemporary working life because they are now obsolete. On the contrary, anthropological research on how we interact with each other and on how physical proximity increases interactions highlights the importance of being together in a physical space. The office is therefore an important and determining factor in communicating the necessary leadership ideas, for collaboration and communication. Many of the new contemporary office buildings in fact have combined different functions by including functions such as residential, bars, restaurants and even gyms. This allows to always alternate the target within the building throughout the day, thus allowing the neighborhood in which they are located to be always active. These spaces therefore become active, an integral part with the city, where one day the function could change, making the home-office aspect a reality more and more. In these open spaces it is therefore the furniture and the finishes, such as warm colors to define the environments and functions. The office of the future may be as familiar as home, or even our neighbor's kitchen table, but only time will tell.

[10] - Literally, coworking can be translated into working together. Coworking was born in San Francisco, in the USA around 2005 from the idea of some freelance programmers to create work spaces where they can host other freelance operators, freelancers, managers and employees with train or plane tickets always in hand. Coworking in Italy began to spread only in 2008. First in the cities of Rome and Milan and, subsequently, throughout the national territory. [11] - WeWork is an American commercial real estate company that provides shared workspaces for technology startups and services for other enterprises. Founded in 2010, it is headquartered in New York City. As of 2018, WeWork managed over 4 million square metres. WeWork designs and builds physical and virtual shared spaces and office services for entrepreneurs and companies. At one time, WeWork had more than 5,000 employees in over 280 locations, spread across 86 cities in 32 countries. In January 2019, the firm announced it would be rebranding to The We Company, and its valuation was stated as $47 billion. The Wall Street Journal noted that upon the release of its public prospectus in August 2019, the company was “besieged with criticism over its governance, business model, and ability to turn a profit.

[image 19] opposite page: Example of a workspace in a Wework office. [image 20] opposite page: Hermann Miller in the holistic offer of new ideas for office furnitures “Living Office”, 2013.

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The idea of Office

What will be the future of offices?

New technologies combined with the needs and new working habits have led to an increase in working spaces, offices, which are not very attractive for investors due to the changed economic characteristics. This reduction in the demand for office space in the global panorama has created an increasing number of real estate units or even entire buildings to be placed on the market for rent or sale. There are also a number of factors that will cause traditional workspaces to lose further ground compared to the evolution of the ways in which we work today. First of all, many aspiring entrepreneurs will not be able to afford the expenses for an office due to insufficient resources to do so in expensive urban areas and the same companies are increasingly trying to unite the different offices under a single headquarters that encompasses all aspects. Furthermore, for a young entrepreneur, opening an office outside urban areas can be too expensive in terms of time lost for travel, opportunities and resources offered by the suburbs. Secondly, these new entrepreneurs will need something agile and modular, which is both a work environment but also a place to release tension and have fun. Today, however, with the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic that has irreversibly affected the whole world, our habits have changed and with them the way we live and work. The lockdown caused by the pandemic led to a real revolution, many companies had to adapt to work from home during the quarantine period and this immediately raised the idea that the Covid-19 pandemic may have been (and is) an opportunity for a real change in collective and individual behavior in the world of work. As the pandemic begins to subside, many companies are planning a new combination of remote and on-site work - a virtual hybrid model where some employees are on-site while others work from home. As we read from numerous articles in newspapers, the future would seem to be more and more smart-working. Born as the result of a global emergency, outcome of an imminent situation, smart-working 1 was actually created before as a model of work organization that, supported by technologies, allowed employees to be happy and fulfilled by autonomously deciding the distribution of loads of work and the place to work. Today it seems to be more and more a model destined to remain present among companies.

[1] - When we talk about Smart-Working (or agile work) we mean a flexible form of work organization. It is an intelligent method, which is based on new technologies. If we wanted to search for an "ancestor" of Smart Working, we could find him in teleworking. The first example of flexible employment, teleworking was born first in the USA and arrived in Italy in the 1980s. Since 1988, much progress has been made. One concept, of all, has become commonly used: that of organizational flexibility. With the spread of the concept of flexibility, spaces, hours and work tools have been reconsidered. Setting aside the ideal of the fixed position, we moved by virtue of an increasingly dynamic employment, according to the needs and requirements of both the employer and the employee.

[image 21] Smart-working examples.

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[2] - Designer, architect and writer, Michele De Lucchi (1951) is one of the main representatives of Italian design in recent decades. His fame is linked to many important products, including the Tolomeo lamp, the best-selling lamp in the world, produced by Artemide in 1987 and which earned him the Compasso d'Oro two years later. [3] - From an article of La Repubblica "L'ufficio cambia: ecco come sarà" written by Silvana Annicchiarico, 28 June 2020.

During the lockdown, in Italy, almost 15% of the workforce carried out their employment through smart working. The new model promises lower costs, greater individual flexibility, and better employee experiences. While these potential benefits are substantial, history shows that the combination of virtual and on-site work could be much more difficult than it looks, despite its success during the pandemic. In fact, if initially it was considered a real lifeline, today it begins to show all its limits. These negative aspects are based on organizational norms that underlie performance, ways of working, standards of behavior, which help create a common culture, generate interaction and social cohesion, and build collective base trust. By losing sight of these steps you risk losing this same trust and long-term social cohesion, trusting in collaboration modes of virtual work. Particular attention must therefore be paid to smart working which today is transforming into something much more definitive, following the examples of many foreign companies such as Twitter, Google and Facebook. As Michele De Lucchi 2 argues in an interview for La Repubblica "Smart working must be an opportunity, not an obligation".3 The designer and architect makes a lucid analysis: the pervasive proliferation of work from home made necessary by the health emergency is not and cannot be the all-encompassing scenario of the future. “Work implies exchange, sociality. It cannot be done without. Work from home is certainly productive, methodical, rigorous. But physical proximity, exchanges, contacts are indispensable because they generate ideas and help to circulate them fluently ”.3 The ideal would be to find a mediation between smart working and office work, so as to preserve the link with the workplace. Every company should create a hybrid virtual model that fits in the best way to their company, let it give life to a new shared culture based on stability, social cohesion, identity, belonging. It should also be remembered that the basis of office work is also an entire local economy linked to commerce, bars, restaurants and small shops that risk having to close due to the slowdown in commerce. The city is made up of many aspects and there are entire neighborhoods where the foundation is the mix of functions and if one of these is missing then the big machine stops working correctly and cyclically. In this panorama, workers are a fundamental and integral part of the big machine, thanks to their presence in the cities there is movement and commerce. Smart working also raises important questions about human and interpersonal relationships, which risk being questioned by working at home. Those who in recent months have begun to experience the agile work experience for the first time find themselves coordinating with colleagues they have already known

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The idea of Office

for some time, using already acquired skills. But a different speech must be made for the generations to come. It is therefore necessary to carefully evaluate what could be the best solution for the world of work and for the well-being of the workers themselves, also remembering the future that will come for office buildings within cities. What certainly emerges is that there is an urgent need to redesign the paradigms of the spatial organization of current offices, as De Lucchi claims "You can no longer think of the office as a battery of computers and desks all the same. The office must become an inspirational model for small communities. A place for sharing and motivation".4

[4] - From an article of La Repubblica "L'ufficio cambia: ecco come sarà" written by Silvana Annicchiarico, 28 June 2020.

Smart-working will determine an evolution of the office, but this will always remain a pillar of the working system of human beings. The main reason is that man is a social animal and he needs to interact with other people and be able to differentiate himself from various colleagues. Physical contact is something that cannot be replaced by technology and that is the basis of social relationships, and it is one of the reasons why offices will continue to be built. This is the reason why it will be necessary to focus more and more attention and strength towards the design of new office spaces.

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2. The Milanese office panorama

The office building is a typology with an ambiguous nature, which at the same time incorporates being a habitat, as there is research aimed at the well-being of the worker aimed at greater production and being a means of production. 1 During the twentieth century, the work space, which was born in conjunction with the office building, is characterized as an individual place within the large production machine of the office, with different degrees of privacy based on the internal hierarchy. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, until the years of reconstruction and the economic boom, tertiary buildings in Milan were a small number and their presence was mainly limited to what is now the historic center of the city. These buildings were often designed to accommodate different functions, sometimes mixing with the residential function, and opening up to the city through the opening of the ground floor to commercial activities. The urban economy at the time was still mainly based on productive activities, which were also located in central areas. The composition of the urban population was directly linked to the productive economy, largely made up of the working class, which finds its livelihood from activities that were based on this economic structure. It was only with the Regulatory Plan approved in 1953 that we began to think about an organization of tertiary building structures. The offices, initially located in apartment buildings and furnished with a domestic imprint, are transmigrated into more adequate and autonomous buildings, where a linear organization of work by sectors is possible with the corridor serving as a spatial element and at the same time as the main coordinator. Unlike American office buildings, towering skyscrapers characterized by less careful architecture, the Milanese office buildings were attentive to the

[1] - Lepore M., Evoluzione dello spazio ufficio, Aracne editrice, 2004.

[image 22] opposite page: "The Culture Trip" image by Marianna Tomaselli.

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[2] - Words of Chessa G., in reference to the Gualino offices, in Forino I., Uffici. Interni arredi oggetti, Piccola biblioteca Einaudi, Torino 2011, page 128. [3] - Ibidem page 138.

urban context in which they were going to fit. In Italy the Taylorist rationalization remains more theoretical than concretely applied, or in any case it does not ignore a certain spatial tradition; on the upper levels are the executive offices, with larger windows and glazed loggias. "The president's office far surpasses all the rest. The feeling you get upon entering it is unforgettable. Isolated on the top floor, away from the noise of the street, it is the most refined and comfortable working environment that the most demanding gentleman can imagine. ."2 Within the open spaces that also spread in our country, the individual space is greater than in America, according to the idea that a work environment should favor the psychological well-being of the person, even before the physiological one. The aesthetic definition of the environments to be diversified according to the recipients contributes to this in a complex integral spatial project, where the desk becomes the vital center of the office and therefore the main nucleus of the project. In this panorama, the Montecatini office building of the years 1935 - 1938 is recognized as the emblem of the integrated project of Milanese modernity, where "the designers measured the desk, which is the dominant piece of furniture in the office environment, and on this measure have tried to find the module of the whole building. The functioning of each office is linked to the constant size of the desks; the axes of light are determined by the position of this furniture; the height of the windowsills is determined by the height of the shelves. Each office becomes a space-module: in the addition of these elements the whole organism is imagined (...) ". 3 Parallel to the ideals on the tertiary sector, present in the 1953 Master Plan, the direction of urban expansion towards the municipalities of the hinterland, especially those to the north, and the breakdown of the rigid mono-centric radial system, the ideal gradual liberation of the areas is pursued central from tertiary, commercial and financial activities, to preserve them for exclusively residential and cultural use. With the succession of the years and the various Regulatory Plans that have controlled and regulated the development of the city, Milan saw the birth and the shaping of different areas decided on the tertiary sector: from the center, to the establishment of collected Management Centers, to the widespread development of the tertiary sector in the suburbs, up to the adaptation of this diffusion, along the route of the passerby to reach the development of areas designed for individual projects.

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The Milanese office panorama

The urban evolution of the tertiary sector

Until the 1950s, Milan, the capital of work, saw the vast majority of Milanese tertiary buildings concentrated in the heart of the city. It was in fact in the period of the Beruto Plan 1 (1884) that the symbolic palaces were built which formed the heart of commercial and tertiary Milan. Beruto wanted to preserve the hybrid reality of Milan in which industry and residence coexisted, the radials branching off from the cathedral were connected by a series of rings to facilitate the passage from one side of the city to the other without weighing on the center. The years that followed, up to the First World War, were the decisive ones for the capitalist development of Milan and the entire nation, in these years the population increased more and more. The strong industrial development, in addition to definitively upsetting the secular balance between the old urban center and the peripheral aggregates and breaking the existing link between housing and business location, induces a strong migratory flow, which accentuates these same phenomena. In Milan, the tendency, which will become a constant in the development of the city, to locate the headquarters of industries, often in close contact with the railway, in peripheral areas. Thus it happens that in the center tertiary activity and stately homes are spreading more and more, and the popular neighborhoods still existing in the central and semi-central areas start a process of abandonment and decay. The potential of the Beruto Plan therefore does not find adequate realization. The lack of planning is in fact increasingly accentuated by the economic interests linked to urban development. In the historic center the process of demolition and tertiary transformation is accentuated while the periphery is enlarged like wildfire in all directions, setting the new road network on the one already partially defined as radiocentric.

[1] - "The plan of our city, on a small scale, bears much resemblance to the section of a tree; the extensions and concentric states are very well noted. It is a very rational plant that has an example in nature; it was therefore not done other than give it the desired greater extension". Words of Cesare Beruto, called to design the first master plan in 1884, with the aim of controlling the rapid growth of the city. [2] - "Prototype of Italian capitalism by now formed by a consolidated intertwining between industrial profit and land rent" in OlivaF., L'urbanistica di Milano:quel ch resta dei piani urbanistici nella crescita e nella trasformazione della città. Milano: Hoepli, 2002.

A new plan was therefore commissioned which will be the PaviaMasera Plan 2 (1912) an expansion plan, which as the only criterion for differentiating the destinations has the different size of the lots, larger for industrial locations, smaller for residential ones. The new element contained in the plan is the railway. The old railway belt constitutes a barrier and therefore a new and wider one is planned. The Venanzi Plan of 1948 instead took a fundamental step in marking the urban evolution of the city: it was on that occasion that the new business center was moved from Scalo Sempione to

1912

Pavia-Masera Plan Tertiary sector developed in the centre.

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the area between the Garibaldi station and the Central station, in direct proximity therefore to the historic center, now widely outsourced. This event was the starting point for the settlement of that directional conurbation partly built already in the 60s and 70s and which is only now being fulfilled through the major projects that have affected the Porta Nuova area.

1948 - 53

Venanzi Plan - Plan of the 1953 Establishment of the Business Centre.

A few years later, with the 1953 Plan, the process of deindustrialisation of the city begins, which results in the transfer of industries a few kilometers further outside, to the periphery, a periphery conceived as a territory with minor rights and which must therefore accept the waste from the central city. The growth of the Milanese tertiary sector was decreed through many industrial transfers which were followed by the disposal of 1,050 hectares of industries, replaced by residences and offices. Furthermore, the idea of concentrating tertiary activities in a new business center was confirmed and strengthened, located in the current Central FS - P.ta Garibaldi area, right at the intersection of two new equipped axes that would have guaranteed the connection of this area. with all the hinterland. The area was positively suitable due to the presence of a mixed productive, artisanal, residential, partly abandoned and degraded fabric and the presence of large empty spaces, the result of the movement of the railway network towards the outside. After an initial implementation of the expropriation program, the plan of the business center will be interrupted, leaving an uneven area characterized by large tears. The Pirelli Skyscraper and the Galfa Tower are two of the architectures that witness the plan never completed. This plan was the expression of an idea for the city of radiocentric mono-centism, dependent on the north north-east of the city, in which the main forecasts of tertiary settlement accumulated. In quantitative terms, the turning point can be traced back to the 1976 Plan, which oversized the forecasts for tertiary development. From here begins the process that ended up leaving long-abandoned office buildings and towers. It will be the construction of the first subway, the M1, that will make the first attempt at territorial connection of the city center, ideally going to take the place of the equipped axes in guiding the development of tertiary and commercial activities. The complex infrastructural system that will develop over the years will greatly affect the location and expansion of the tertiary areas, for which, as we will see later, the possibility of connection is a condition of fundamental importance.

1976

Plan of the 1976 Tertiary development widespread in the periphery.

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The 1970s represent the peak of the period of maximum population growth for Milan, due to the strong industrial economy that dominated the entire urban ecosystem. Subsequently, the fall of

The Milanese office panorama

this economic system and the conversion towards a labor market centered on the tertiary sector and services, were the cause of a strong demographic decrease, caused by the reduction of jobs, and the birth of a segment of the population urban commuter, the so-called “city users”. The intensification of exchanges with the hinterland will see the beginning of urban expansion also towards the South, with the placement of popular housing districts on the border with the agricultural park, and the construction of the tertiary complex of Milano Fiori and the Forum d ' Assago. To the east, another tertiary center, the headquarters of Mondadori, by Oscar Niemeyer in 1968, will mark the beginning of the development of the large tertiary complexes located on the outskirts of the city, in the neighboring municipalities of the hinterland to the east and west, made possible by development of major infrastructural axes tangent to the urban system. This unilateral infrastructural work responded to an idea of a widespread, low-density city, welded as an "urban continuum" to the surrounding municipalities. In these years the tertiary sector had an uncontrolled development, gradually expanding, from the city center, towards the surrounding area. The city center will see, in recent years, better define its composition, towards a tertiary densification and a high-level residential presence. The 1980s saw the completion of the transition from a productive to a tertiary and service economy. Logics of delocalization, production reorganization, technological updating, added to the growing financial value of the land, caused the rapid completion of the process of decommissioning the production plants, leaving six million square meters of empty areas within the urban circle and the whole Metropolitan area. An essential component of this process is also the growing demand for quality tertiary and commercial construction. Urban development therefore focuses on the reconversion of the numerous abandoned areas, located in different parts of the city, such as P.ta Vittoria, P.ta Romana, P.ta Genova, but above all in the areas to the north, the Bicocca and Bovisa. A standard that facilitates the conversion of former production areas, allows the construction of tertiary complexes in peripheral areas, creating a system of new doors, characterized by a mediocre architectural quality and responding to speculative and repetitive logic of models without any reference to the surrounding fabric . This is the case of the Ex Ginori area, of the former Verona paper mills and of the complex of towers in via Stephenson which today represent a precise model of the urban landscape that can be identified along the entire ring road of the Milanese suburbs.

1984

Passante Project Director document Transformations on the rail route of the "passante".

In the 1990s, the Directorate Document for abandoned industrial areas was developed, which in the previous decade had obtained

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The Milanese office panorama

a greater definition, and had been integrated into urban planning tools, these areas see the actual realization of the conversion processes. In addition, there was a series of area projects which, under the name of PRU, PII, PRUSST, 3 would have affected those large areas of transformation which are still in part still evolving today and which, as we have already seen, will contribute once the works are completed to further overload the availability of office buildings in the city. This is the case of the Garibaldi area - Repubblica, Montecity, Portello Fiera-City Life, Tecnocity, Bovisa, Porta Vittoria and Porta Romana. At the same time, many individual projects of tertiary complexes have been carried out increasingly moved towards the outside of the city, even in the hinterland, often creating real "office districts" far from the city center, in search of better infrastructural connections and lower costs .

[3] - The second half of the 1990s saw starting the season of large urban renewal projects, thanks to ministerial funding and new and faster administrative procedures. PRU: Urban Redevelopment, PII: Integrated intervention programs, PRUSST: Plans Urban Redevelopment and Sustainable Territory Development Programs.

Over the past 20 years, major urban revolutions have changed the appearance of Milan as well as its economy. The transition to a post-industrial city has almost completely concluded, with the implementation of almost all the reconversion plans of abandoned areas started in the 90s. Other industrial areas have been added to the vacant industrial areas, coming from the decentralization of important urban functions, such as the areas resulting from the progressive liberation of the railway yards due to the change in industrial models, those due to the definitive disposal of military areas within the inhabited center or those deriving from peripheral tertiary complexes never started. Urban transformations of more than 10 million square meters between the Municipality of Milan and the first-tier municipalities have given rise to new centralities, trying to re-establish a new relationship between the core and the vast peripheral areas. During these changes, the city has acquired a new tertiary heritage, those concentrated in the new monofunctional tertiary centers, and those developed on the occasion of important development plans, mixed between new tertiary functions, residential surfaces and public spaces. All these major interventions, however, are essentially of a private nature and do not respond to a strategic logic dictated by public planning but to the free expression of market interests implemented with the consent of the public administration. The goal, partially achieved, was to attract the attention of foreign investors who could finance new projects in the city, to relaunch its future. The delegation to the market of the planning functions of urban development, however, shows all the weaknesses of this approach which, in the absence of an overall direction, is unable to answer the city questions correctly.

'90 - 00'

PRU, PIL, PRUSST... Development for individual project areas.

[image 23] opposite page: The business center in 1961, the UTC tower was under construction. [image 24] opposite page: Isola and the Business Center, 1964.

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The Milanese office panorama

The postwar Milanese offices

The post-war years marked an important moment in the Italian and European architectural panorama in general. After the war destructions, there were urban reconstruction and renewal works unthinkable until a few years earlier.

[1] - Carlo Pagani, Architettura italiana oggi, Hoepli, Milan, 1955, p. 27-28.

In Italy, many innovative architectural works left unfinished during the war years, were completed and in particular in Lombardy and in its capital, there were numerous architectures of great modernity. These new buildings were designed and built by a group of educated professionals, halfway between the world of engineering and that of art, who, by combining structural research and experimentation with materials, produced a series of notable very avant-garde buildings. Among the great protagonists of those times, we find Ignazio Gardella, BBPR, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Figini and Pollini, Vico Magistretti, Asnago, and Vender. These voices came together to create great debates, present in all the major architecture magazines of those years, on which strategies to use for the reconstruction of a post-rationalist Milan. "A generic need for renewal, the practical need to rebuild the country, the weakening of the men who represented the monumental rhetoric, the contribution of the new generations and above all a general evolution of taste, were decisive for modern renewal" 1 this is how Carlo Pagani describes the conditions of Italy, which save from any dogmatism on an architectural level, driven by a desire for change and a break with the past, produces great examples of architecture. These are the years in which the housing theme becomes a real field of experimentation with great attention to the humanization of living. Structure, flexibility, industrialization, and prefabrication are themes of real comparison in those years, remaining constant values in the new post-war city that grows and transforms itself towards a challenge for quality.

[image 25] opposite page: The spire with the fomous "Madonnina del Duomo" and the Velasca tower in the background.

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History [2] - Piazza Cordusio is a square in Milan. Located where the court of the Lombard dukes stood, the Curia Ducis, from which the name of the square derives, once represented the financial center of Milan, since it housed the headquarters of various financial institutions. [3] - Palazzo Broggi is a historic building located in the center of Milan in Piazza Cordusio n. 3. It is also known as Palazzo delle Poste and Palazzo della Borsa vecchia for its previous uses. The building was designed by the architect Luigi Broggi and inaugurated in October 1901. [4] - "Il professionismo colto" refers to that postwar period where a generation of professionals, with expressive freedom and heirs of the renewal generated by the Modern Movement, rebuilt the city after the bombings. From Capitanucci M. V., Professionalism learned after the war, Solferino Edizioni, 2015.

Office buildings are a key element for the city of Milan, which boasts a long, rich and articulated tradition. These architectures have nominated it and made it the capital of work and business on the national scene, thus linking its urban image to work and productivity. One of the obvious examples is Piazza Cordusio 2, the result of the first transformations of the historic center between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The square was redesigned, becoming an important hub of city traffic and leading to the demolition of many buildings to make room for new structures that would house banks and offices, a wellknown example is Palazzo Broggi 3, it was the seat of the Milan Stock Exchange from 1900 until 1932. . In recent years, the situation of the workplace remains unchanged, we find the representative buildings within the Spanish bastions and the buildings for the production of material in the hinterland, this allowed an appropriate connection with the railway system and the freight yard. In the following years we have therefore several attempts that respond to the requests of the client, oriented towards the functionality of the spaces but also towards a representativeness of the same building. In the 1970s, Milan boasts a great heritage of factories and porductive areas that were specialized in the production of Italian excellence. These large productive structures of the first industrialization were located in the suburbs and over the years these were abandoned; today they have almost all been lost, as they have been dismantled. However, we have a number of examples linked to "professionismo colto" 4 even within the city. The theme was in fact the subject of interest in compositional research, both for the production methods that had changed, and for the relationship with the surrounding context, the complex city.

[image 26] image of Piazza Cordusio once the financial heart of the city.

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Architecture for the tertiary sector provides numerous design opportunities for verification and experimentation, important in terms of quantity and quality, intensifying in recent decades in response to the progressive and pressing dematerialization of assets. We already have some well-known examples in the period between the two wars: the Palazzo della Borsa in Piazza degli Affari, by Paolo Mezzanotte (1928-1931), and the Palazzo dei Giornali in Piazza Cavour by Giovanni Muzio (1938-1942) and the palace for the Montecatini Offices in via Moscova 3, by Gio Ponti and Antonio Fornaroli and Soncini (1936-1938).

The Milanese office panorama

Subsequently, after the Second World War, the possibility of building in the most central areas generates very subtle and rigorous reflections on issues of the relationship with the pre-existing buildings and therefore of building within the built. Among these buildings, a well-known example is the Chase Manhattan Bank in Piazza Meda dei Bbpr (1969).

[5] - This project took shape in a particular and complex historical moment. Italian society was experiencing a period of intense transformation, marked by profound social conflicts. The construction of a building “undoubtedly unique in the city of Milan and, probably, in Italy”, according to Giorgio Mondadori himself, is the result of a desire capable of going beyond contingent difficulties. Extract from www.mondadori.it.

In the same period we also see some modern office buildings, which follow a more direct continuity with the rationalist research of the past. Some examples are: in via Solferino built by Gigi Gho in 1950, in via Senato by Roberto Menghi and Marco Zanuso in 1947, in via Paleocapa by Pietro Lingeri built in 1953 and in via Hoepli by Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini in 1956. A known case is that of Mario Asnago and Claudio Vender in the construction of the buildings in Piazza Missori, their continuity makes them particularly important and evocative in the Milanese panorama. In 1960 we finished the work on the well-known Pirelli Skyscraper by Gio Ponti, Antonio Fornaroli, Alberto Rosselli, Giuseppe Valtolina and Egidio Dell'Orto, designed in 1950 and included in the nascent "Centro Direzionale". With the end of the sixties, the panorama of the world of offices in Milan changes radically, the settlement logic of the headquarters is progressively affirmed, no longer within the historic city, but progressively more and more distant from the historic center. This is because a new communicative and representative strategy was needed on another scale and the periphery allowed entire companies to be brought together under a single location. One of the best known examples is the Mondadori headquarters 5 designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Between 1950 and 1965 Mondadori employees increased from 335 to 3,000, so it was decided to build a new building in a peripheral area that was identified in the municipality of Segrate. The project for the new headquarters is a sort of "advertising architecture", in Niemeyer's own words, a building that does not need signs and is capable of imprinting itself in memory.

[image 27] image of Mondadori Headquarters by Oscar Niemeyer in 1968-75.

This new policy of more radical decentralization and localization of large mono-functional containers, appropriately located at an economic level outside the consolidated city, is in extreme opposition to the "home-work" theme, which is the careful object of urban planning culture and the Modern Movement. In fact, these places usually remain without infrastructural support for public transport, therefore accessible only by private means. At this very moment the trend towards construction begins of anonymous containers generically intended for the "tertiary"

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sector that strongly characterize the expanding city. They are the classic prefabricated buildings covered with mirrored windows that can be found on the edge of the city, characterized by little research and study and low architectural quality. Despite this new trend, we still have construction attempts in the heart of the city: interventions carried out either by punctual replacement or by saturation of the blocks. Like the well-known Palazzo Montedoria, built from 1968 to 1971, it was the last Milanese building designed by Gio Ponti. Office building where the long facades are characterized by a play of protrusions and recesses, marked by the ceramic coating, which are arranged to form a very rich texture, coplanar with the aluminum windows to bring the sky even in this area of the city. If we compare the office buildings of modern contemporary Milan with those present in London, New York or Berlin in the same years, we will certainly realize that Milan is not a city of glass, but with a careful look at the details we can understand the attentions and refinements that are behind these examples of the great masters of Italian architecture. In fact, in those years the design was in close contact with the production of innovative and specialized materials such as. These were the years of research and experimentation regarding new issues that are still current today: from living to workplaces, which in addition to offering workspaces, had to generate architectural and spatial quality, to residential construction with a part dedicated to the world of work. Important themes were also the architectural language, formal expression of the typology, and the new made in Italy materials on the market. The goal was always to create architectural quality.

Typological and technological aspect Within this panorama the quality guaranteed by the technique and at the same time the craftsmanship are two of the components that enrich and give identity to the solutions found and that characterize the Italian specificity and even more that of individual designers. Particular attention must be paid both to the typological aspect, very important for the reconstruction of the Milanese city fabric, and to the technological one, thanks to the new construction techniques introduced. In the common tension towards formal and typological research, there are different design approaches of the best architects who have been working in recent years trying to safeguard their different concepts. The effort towards individuality, necessary for the development of a great variety of typologies,

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The Milanese office panorama

is strongly expressed in the general framework of a modern standardization. Figures such as Luigi Caccia Dominioni offer important contributions to the development of a new idea of understanding spatiality as regards the home in particular. The final aspiration is to create complex organisms that last as long as possible and are responsive to the needs of the man of the time but also of the future, with attention to psychological rather than physical needs, in an almost religious respect for traditions. This research does not fail even with regards to the field of designing office spaces, where in addition to offering an environment for work, attention is also paid to the spatial quality of the environment itself. Asnago and Vender base their Milanese production on constant research and architectural experimentation aimed at simplifying the language of composition and the use of modern technologies for comfort. The years of reconstruction saw them as protagonists with their works where particular attention is paid to materials and even decorative details.

[6] - Quote from Vaccaro G. in Forino I., Uffici. Interni arredi oggetti, Piccola biblioteca Einaudi, Torino 2011, page 210.

In these same years we have numerous examples with innovative construction techniques and technologies, an example is the Galfa Tower by Melchiorre Bega. "Of the skyscrapers of Milan this is the most chaste. It does not want to exhibit inventions or founds, nor does it aim to astound [...] the author has been able to concentrate his commitment in the search for the most essential values, neglecting any superfluous complacency, any exercise ." 6 The lightness and transparency of the glazed façade allow a glimpse of the internal spatiality, conceived and organized for the function for which the twenty-nine typical floors were intended: thanks to the modulation and flexibility with which the distribution was conceived, the spaces follow one another clearly around the pillars. The windows that characterize the façade are made by the Greppi brothers' company who want to push its width to the maximum of technical possibilities, but the original idea is modified with the inclusion of an additional horizontal partition. The equipment and technological development are the peculiar characteristics of this Milanese tower from the 1950s, defined as an exemplary model of lightness and constructive purity. The numerous changes introduced in this period of evolution contribute to modify the urban image of Milan: the increase in the height of the buildings and the study of the floor plans, the overcoming of the closed court type, a sign of the city introversion of the previous century the introduction of technological systems and even more the industrialization of production constitute the new character of the city.

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The Milanese office panorama

Noteworthy examples

In the years, from 1945 to the end of the following decade, there was a vast mobilization of the entire country for the reconstruction work. Architectural culture was invested with the role of recomposing the image of a country devastated by the conflicts. The architecture of the 1940s and 1950s is therefore intimately traversed by a populist spirit, aimed at identifying itself with the social effort of rebirth from the indigence and humiliation of war. From those years we selected a list of buildings with the intention to investigate the issue of the workplace in post-war Milan. There are several significant buildings, which over the years have been of reference. They deserve a careful reading for the symbolic charge and monumental accent within which they decline the theme of the workplace, also for their ability to be models for subsequent experiences. The cases selected, in the general context of the urban structure, identify themselves with the city, building the fundamental structure on which it is based and that characterizes it. These examples present a particular level of stylistic relevance and reflect the attention and care towards design in the post-war recostruction. Attention was also paid on the typology issue, thus trying to analyze multiple types and possible solutions within the Milanese panorama. These years were years of debate and architectural experimentation on various fronts. Each of the "great thinkers", of this founding experience of the architectural thought of those years, interprets an reinterprets the theme of architecture in the purest and sometimes more "exasperated" form of a language in search of compositional rules. Even today there are several interesting and innovative aspects that these projects have, from which you can draw inspiration. On the following page, we reported the list of all the selected examples in chronological order.

[image 28] opposite page: Construction site of the Swiss Center in 1950.

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Office

Office + shops + residential

Office + residential

Office + shops

Office +residential + shops

Office

Office + residence

(1947) - 1950 Office building, Via senato 11, Roberto Menghi + Marco Zanuso In the early postwar years, the building was crucial in the redevelopment of the city center. Sober and clear architecture with refined finishes and rigorous facades. (1949) - 1952 Centro Svizzero, Piazza Camillo Benso di Cavour 4, Armin Meili Among the first buildings of the post-war reconstruction, the building rises projected towards a future that will be that of the city: of renewal, exchanges and activities. (1951) - 1952 Montecatini spa office building, Largo Donegani 1, Gio Ponti, Antonio Fornaroli The headquarters of the new Montecatini offices, in addition to those of Via Moscova, take up the characters and materials. It has a façade marked by horizontal bands and animated by light overhangs. (1951) - 1953 Complex Corso Italia, Corso Italia 13-15-17, Luigi Moretti In this complex the themes of volumetry and architectural plasticism are brought forward. It is a multifunctional body based on modular criteria and flexibility, which allows the alternation of functions. (1951) - 1954 Torre Breda, Piazza della Repubblica 32, Luigi Mattioni This skyscraper represented for Milan a concrete manifestation of its rapid recovery. The tower, tidy, clean with its sharp top is covered with small tiles in gray-blue ceramic stoneware. (1953) - 1956 Complex Via Albricci, Via A. Albricci 10, Mario Asnago + Claudio Vender Singular corner solution, which closes the perspective, with the slight curvature and the progressive overhang of the wall above the base to define the configuration of the surrounding space. (1955) - 1957 Hoepli building, Via Hoepli 5, Luigi Figini + Gino Pollini The project displays the structural skeleton on the façade made up of reinforced concrete beams and pillars. The arcade on the street, has been restored by the architects to balanced proportions. (1955) - 1957 Office building, Corso Europa 22, Vico Magistretti The plan was designed to allow the necessary planimetric variability, also the windows, divided into three portions, allow the insertion of the dividing joists for the division of the spaces. (1951) - 1958 Torre Velasca, Piazza Velasca 5, BBPR This building and its image represent a turning point in Italian architecture. This building, characterized by the large upper volume and the exposed structure, rises above the surrounding urban fabric.

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Office

Residential +office + shops

Office

Office + residential

Office

Office + shops

(1956) - 1959 Torre Galfa, Via Gustavo Fara 41, Melchiorre Bega Located within the nascent Business Center, the skyscraper was the seat of the Sarom oil company. The characterizing element is the purity of the volume that rises almost transparent from the urban context. (1955) - 1960 Pirelli building, Piazza Duca d'Aosta 3, Gio Ponti, A. Fornaroli, G. Valtolina, E. Dell'Orto This skyscraper is one of the signs with which the modern city identifies itself, even abroad. With its 127 meters, it's made of reinforced concrete. It was designed with a particular shape configuration. (1957) - 1961 Building in Corso Italia, Corso Italia 22-24, Luigi Caccia Dominioni Interesting for the particular complexity of the urban theme and for the variety and richness of answers given, the building is made up of composite volumes and mixed destinations. (1960) - 1964 Office building STIPEL, Piazza Luigi Einaudi 8, Melchiorre Bega The building appears as a pure volume, with a façade constructed from a series of superimposed grids that define the fixed windows, the elements that can be open and the opaque panels at their intersections. (1955) - 1966 Municipal tower, Via Pirelli 39, V. Gandolfi, R. Bazzoni, L. Fratino, A. Putelli This project for the tower won the competition held by the Municipality of Milan. The building has responded to operational requests in a functional way and is proposed as a representative image. (1963) - 1967 Torre Turati, Via Filippo Turati 40, Giovanni Muzio + Lorenzo Muzio The Turati tower is a skyscraper of 75 meters high, which has 19 floors, it was built by Muzio on behalf of Reale Mutua Assicurazioni, and it serves as a gateway to the new financial district. (1958) - 19569 Chase Manhattan Bank, Via Ulrico Hoepli 7, BBPR The volume has three parts, like a Renaissance palazzo, where to ashlar-work base gives way to series of arches in iron, while the attic level set back at the top. The exposed structure is in steel. (1959) - 1962 Palazzo di Fuoco, Viale Monza 2, Giulio Minoletti + Giuseppe Chiodi It is a building with a reinforced concrete structure and external facades covered with a curtain wall in anodized aluminum. The systems were very advanced for the time. (1964) - 1970 Montedoria building, Via G. B. Pergolesi 25, Gio Ponti, A. Fornaroli, A. Rosselli The volumes built derive from the application of the building regulations. To bring back the proportions, the main facade was divided into smaller partitions, covered with faceted green ceramic tiles.

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The Milanese office panorama

Via A. Albricci 10, Asnago & Vender, 1953-1959

Over a period of time ranging from 1939 to 1958, Mario Asnago and Claudio Vender designed a series of buildings that are part of the block bordered by via Albricci, Paolo da Cannobio and piazza Velasca. The building is the last construction, in chronological order, developed on nine floors above ground and concentrates the office spaces in the seven intermediate levels, one office for the first four levels and seven units for each of the following ones, with the ground floor used as shops and the penthouse with apartments. The corner solution is singular, closing the perspective from via Larga, with the slight curvature and the progressive projection of the wall above the base along via Albricci to define the configuration of the surrounding space.

> Via A. Albricci, 10, Milan. • OFFICES • SHOPS

[image 29] opposite page: Picture of the building from Via Larga. Groundfloor plan scale 1:1000 From the ground floor it can be seen how the requirements of the building regulations and economic convenience, which required the achievement of the maximum building surface possible, were followed, thus forming a continuous curtain.

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History and morphology Asnago and Vender are among the small number of architects who, working in an extremely rigorous and methodical way, are able to make the ordinary beautiful, redeeming routine and giving it new quality. Subtle asymmetries, skilful juxtapositions, measured variations make the interventions by Asnago and Vender notable examples of architecture conceived as such, without ideological or historicist references. The result is a pure and balanced beauty, not exploitable and difficult to imitate. The space of research of Asnago and Vender is however dictated by the city and its rules: they find themselves operating in the context of economic needs and building laws that imposed precise rules and conditions on new buildings, these impositions were not seen as limits by the two designers, but rather as an opportunity to redeem the banal. In 1939, the design of the office and shop building began in via Albricci 8, which was followed by the construction of almost the entire block. The buildings that follow one another along the street are linked by the perfect coplanarity of the facades, which thus form a continuous curtain, punctuated by openings and elegant variations of colors and materials, in which the unitary conception is not identified with the figurative uniformity but rather with the possibility of formulating a language of urban space that foresees variations within the same scheme. All the buildings were built in accordance with the provisions of the Albertini plan for the "Racchetta" system, subsequently confirmed by the post -war in 1953. A more unique than rare opportunity for a designer: to have the possibility of building a coherent part of the city, which in this case stands out for its unusual component compared to the surrounding buildings. The two architects, complying with the requirements of the building regulations and economic convenience, which required the achievement of the maximum building surface possible, managed to ennoble this condition as a starting point for an extraordinary compositional research. The buildings that follow one another along via Albricci are linked by the perfect coplanarity of the facades, which thus form a continuous curtain, marked by openings and elegant variations of colors and materials, in which the unitary conception is not identified with figurative uniformity but rather with the possibility of formulating a language of urban space that foresees variations within the same scheme. The first building in chronological order, in via Albricci 8, takes up the familiar division between the base and the floors above, also emphasized by the use of the perfectly smooth surface given

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The Milanese office panorama

by the straw-colored Chiampo marble for the lower strip and the klinker for the upper one. This horizontality is however attenuated by the vertical trend, marked by windows whose dimensions in the upper floors correspond exactly to the distance between one and the other. The windows are characterized by flush windows, in which, however, the openings are rhythmically enlarged upwards to the crowning of the building, consisting of a perforated wall. The new element is represented by the flag-like alignment to the right of the upper windows with respect to those of the base, which are wider: this expedient ensures that in the facade there is a sort of snap to the right, accentuated by the asymmetry division of the windows, which moves the composition. The distribution system is characterized by a double entrance hall, with the respective accesses from via Albricci and from piazza Velasca, which lead to the ski lifts (two stairs and three lifts) in a central position; on the upper floors, a corridor disengages the offices facing the street surrounding the stairwell. The penthouse apartments are entirely surrounded by a terrace screened with a perforated wall, in which the pillars alternately align with the underlying windows, on the left side, and on the center line of the full vertical bands, on the right.

Typical floor plan scale 1:500

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[image 30] Detail of the window flush with the facade in aluminum. [image 31] Detail of the corner of the building. [image 32] opposite page: Overall photo with the Torre Velasca peeking out from behind.

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The Milanese office panorama

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The Milanese office panorama

Torre Velasca, BBPR, 1951-1958

Born with the label of "Europe's most debated skyscraper", the Torre Velsca represents one of the greatest expressions of the modern movement, it is to be considered unique both for architecture and design within the world urban landscape. For over 50 years it has been one of the symbols of the Milanese skyline: with its 27 floors, that rise 99 meters in height and its characteristic "mushroom" shape, it is one of the most important works of post-war architecture. It is a small city on its own: shops, offices, study-houses, characteristic houses, villas, all in a single architectural unit that combines tradition and innovation, historicity and modernity. An architecture that has made the history of Milan.

> Piazza Velasca, 3/5, Milan. • RESIDENCE • OFFICES • SHOPS

[image 33] opposite page: Picture of the tower with the surrounding buildings.

Groundfloor scale 1:1000 The groundfloor, based on spatial continuity between the interior and exterior, develop around the central nucleous of the Tower.

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History [10] Arturo Danusso, engineer and professor of Construction Science at the Politecnico di Milano, Italian academic and politician. In the 1950s he collaborated on the design of the three skyscrapers in Milan, the 109 m high Galfa tower, 106 m high Velasca tower, and the 127 m high Pirelli skyscraper. He collaborated directly with Pierluigi Nervi on the structural design of the Pirelli Skyscraper. [11] P. Portoghesi, Introduction, in E. Bonfanti, M. Porta, City Museum of Architecture. The BBPR group in Italian architectural culture 1932-1970, Milan, 1973, page 8. [12] ibidem.

At the beginning of the 1950s, in the quadrant of the historic center of Milan south of the Duomo, the rubble of the Second World War was rapidly giving way to new buildings. The famous office and residential complexes of Asnago and Vender (1950-1952) and Luigi Moretti (1951-1953), among others, have already been completed, excellent examples of two different and personal Italian interpretations of architectural modernity. Not far from both, the construction site of the Torre Velasca opens in 1951, commissioned by the General Real Estate Company to the Milanese firm BBPR, founded in 1932 by Gian Luigi Banfi (1910-1945), Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso (1909-2004), Enrico Peressutti (1908-1976) and Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969). Completed in 1958, the tower is universally recognized as a pivotal episode in the history of twentieth century architecture. The request made to the studio was to conceive a mixed tertiary-residential building, as part of a broader urban reconfiguration of the area. The first constructive hypotheses show how the logic of the BBPR was influenced by the architectural culture of the early 1950s. The original idea, in fact, provided for a simple transparent volume covered by a glass curtain wall, supported by a steel structure, followed by a hypothesis intermedia, which shows a tripartite body tapering towards the bottom, the first attempt to break the compactness of the volume and free itself from the canonical image of the modernist skyscraper. The need to exploit the maximum living space suggested expanding the volumes in the upper part, orienting the project in the characteristic mushroom shape that recalls the tradition of Renaissance towers. Furthermore, by virtue of a study conducted by a specialized company in New York, a reinforced concrete solution is preferred, which reduces costs by a quarter. The structure, cast on site and exhibited with mighty tapered ribs that run along the facades and widen into characteristic connecting struts on the eighteenth floor, was calculated by Professor Arturo Danusso10. It is precisely the structure that defines the linguistic code, kept on the outside to guarantee a unique internal flexibility, it also marks the material language of the facade, characterized by the regular pitch of the concrete ribs in contrast with the "disheveled" 11 - as Portuguese defines them - the geometry of the windows, which are "a more complex re-edition of the dialectic between the structural cage and the wall envelope of Italian rationalism" 12. In the transition from the steel solution to the reinforced concrete one, a linguistic reversal also took place: from a project in full harmony with the prevailing International Style, the BBPR moved

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The Milanese office panorama

to a solution that caused a sensation at the CIAM Congress in Otterlo in 1959 due to Neo-Gothic frame, the terminal spiers, the large pitched roof covering the attic floor, references to the profile of a medieval tower. The shape of the Velasca tower, unique in the world architectural panorama, depicts and tells the spirit of Renaissance Milan, the facade in fact represents a continuous dialogue between fundamental elements of architecture: supporting shaped pillars in projection, perforated masonry of the irregular sequence of windows and loggias and the secondary structure composed of pillars.

[image 34] Detail of the facade of the tower, composed by prefabricated elements.

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8th sector

26 25 24 23

7th sector

22 21 20

6 sector th

19 18 17

3rd sector

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01

2nd sector

5th sector

4th sector

1st sector

-1 -2

The Milanese office panorama

Morphology The building consisting of 29 floors, two of which are basement with 400 car parkings, can be divided up into 8 superimposed sectors: - First sector: the 2 basements floors are almost entirely used for services plant and installations except for part of the first basement which is used by the shops above; - Second sector: the ground floor is for shops and is partially occuped by entrance halls; - Third sector: the first floor is taken up by offices or special commercial uses; - Fourth sector: nine floors are used as offices, this sector can be divided into a maximum of 95 indipendent units of 2 to 5 rooms plus bathrooms, with the possibility of grouping several units; - Fifth sector: seven floors are uses as professional offices with homes, each dwelling is provided with a kitchen cabinet. In those years this was a real innovation for the buildings in Milan, this units where intended for those who needed to work and live in a central position; - Sixth sector: the 18th floor which separates the base of the tower from the expansion above, is occupied partially by equipment and plant and partly by living quarters for the custodian and service staff; - Seventh sector: six floors for private apartments. - Eight sector: two last floors for the "villas" with the daytime use on the 25th floor and the sleeping quarters on the 26th floor. Each unit has a has a big terrace. This last two sectors, from 19th to the 26th floor, are composed by 72 new and innovative apartments, they were conceived with the most modern innovations and all of the comforts required by modern life, whatever their size, with the typically American criterion of organized housing units. This houses in the upper part, from two to seven rooms plus services, are all equipped with bathrooms a veranda or terrace, and - according to a model that rarely finds application in Italy - with all fixed furnishings (wardrobes, kitchen and appliances), so that tenants should only provide for their own furniture. They are endowed with a paronamic position of extreme interest, as they are tridated in the expanded part of the tower from 60 up to 80 meters high from the road level. In the building there are also the most modern lifts (100 people can go inside simultaneously) and the most modern adjustable air conditioning system in each room. Facing page: Longitudianal section, scale 1: 600.

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Structure The reinforced concrete structure that rises 87.70 meters above street level, 99 meters if the accessory elements on the roof are included, consists of a central bracing core, perimeter pillars with eight meters of centre to centre distance, delineating the external movement of the facade, parapet beams aligned with the outer edge and brick floors. The tower has a unique morphology, characterized by protruding higher floors, protruding from the lower body - according to medieval tower models - born from the limited surrounding space that allowed for expansion only in the upper floors. The oblique beams support the expansion of the upper floors and give the skyscraper uniqueness. The external structure is divided into a series of vertical elements, the columns, horizontal elements, the parapet beams, and on the 18th floor, by inclined compressed elements, the struts, and by horizontal elements that function as tie rods. It should also be emphasized the importance of the pillars along the facades, placed at a distance of 1.58 meters from each other (distance that the module of the construction plan relates to), have a functional and aesthetic role, they mark the facades vertically and horizontally , giving order and symmetry to the building, dividing the light of the pillars into four parts in the base and five in the crowning. The opaque masonry, pierced by the irregular series of windows and loggias, is very different from the transparent closures typical of most of the tall buildings and thus provides the idea of home, of residence.

[image 14] Structural plan of the tower.

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The postwar Milanese offices

M A

B H

M A

B H

Type floor of the offices. scale 1:400

L A

G H

L A

Plan of the 15th floor: example of offices with dwellings. scale 1:400

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Plan of the 18th floor for technical installation and rooms for the staff. scale 1:400

Plan of the 25th floor, with two-storey apartments (on two floors). scale 1:400

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The Milanese office panorama

Type floor of the apartments. scale 1:400

kitchen bathroom vertical distribution

! ! "

" " ##

! (

! #,

! !

)

Scheme of the apartments composition. scale 1:500

11 units: with kitchen, living room, 1/2 bedrooms, 1/2 bathrooms and a terrace.

Kitchen : - 6/8 m2 - no windows - 2 doors - compact forniture

! scale 1:200

Bathroom : - 5/6 m2 - no windows - sometimes divided

" scale 1:200

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Materials: innovation and tradition The Velasca tower uses nearby pre-existing buildings for stylistic choices both internally and as regards the façade, drawing from these it manages to become a unicum that cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world. Also in the choice of materials that make up the façade there is a strong focus on the problem of building within the pre-existing environmental structures, this refinement is evidenced by the use of infill panels thrown out of work with shades that can give the tower the ability to bind to the tones that surround it. BBPR is also responsible for the design of fixed and semi-fixed finishes and furnishings, still largely preserved in the residential units and offices. Prefabricated elements In the composition of the façade we find several prefabricated elements: pillars, shoulders and window sills, made up of a cast of concrete with aggregates of Veronese marble. Even the infill panels are prefabricated modular elements, 40x220 cm in size and 4 cm thick, they consist of a cast of concrete with an extrados formed by large diameter colored clinker elements and mortar with minute aggregates of Veronese marble.

[image 35] Detail of the facade and of the metal elements.

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The Milanese office panorama

Detail of the prefabricated elements: 1. Pillar 2. Panel 3. Shelf, windowsill The facade is made up of modular prefabricated elements that therefore allow to change its composition according to different needs.

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The Milanese office panorama

Chase Manhattan Bank, BBPR, 1958-1969

> Via Ulrico Hoepli, 5, Milan.

The Detail Plan of 1934 for the urban organization of Piazza Meda called for a building with a trapezoidal profilem which according BBPR would have clashed with the apse and lantern of the San Fedele church. To avoid dual visual foci, the studio places the front towards the square on an almost curved faceted polygonal line. The volume thus connects on one site with the tall portico of the Hoepli building by Figini & Pollini, and on the other with the bulding next to the church. The exposed structure is in steel, while the vertical access shafts are reinforced concrete. The volume has three parts, like a Reinassance palazzo, where the ashlar-work base gives way to a series of arches in iron, while the attic level is set back at the top.

• OFFICES

[image 36] opposite page: Chase Manhattan Bank seen from the corner with via San Paolo. Photography by Marco Introini, 2008.

Groundfloor scale 1: 1000 The BBPR building stands on a lot designed by the 1934 master plan, still in effect at the time of the construction of the offices for the Chase Manhattan Bank, which involved the construction of a trapezoidal block to complete the square.

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History For a period of eleven years, from 1958 to 1969, the BBPR dealt with a reconstruction intervention in a lot in a square in the center full of references and references to the architectural history of Milan. On the other sides of the square there are large twentieth-century buildings: Palazzo Bolchini, by Pier Giulio Magistretti, Palazzo Crespi, by Piero Portaluppi, and the Banca Popolare by Giovanni Greppi, all designed between 1928 and 1931. The BBPR, however, turn their attention from one side to the volumes of the apse and the tambour of the church of San Fedele, and on the other to the sober rationalism of the building by Figini and Pollini for the headquarters of the Hoepli publishing house. The Detailed Plan in force, dating back to 1934, provides for a symmetrical construction with respect to the opposite side of the square, with an approach entirely consistent with the interventions carried out in Piazza San Babila and in Corso Matteotti. A judgment of the BBPR, the trapezoidal shape of the building would have been badly reconciled with the back of San Fedele, to the point of requiring a variant of the plan. The result is a building that describes a wide curve, lifting a semi-cylindrical mass from the ground that had unprecedented volumetric relations with the nearby monument. The scan of the pilasters of the church is transformed into the structural matrix of thin metal uprights, according to a facade solution then applied also in the interventions in via Verdi and in corso Vittorio Emanuele.

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The complex designed to house the offices of the Chase Manhattan Bank has a floor plan based on a long broken line, which determines its direction towards the square and which is the result of the desire of the BBPR to link their intervention with the celebrated building of the Hoepli (designed by Figini and Pollini), on one side, and with a small block leaning against the church of San Fedele (later restored by Luigi Caccia Dominioni), on the other. The very high portico, imposed by the rules of the plan although out of scale, was solved by Figini and Pollini in the building next door with an accessory beam that optically reduces its height by reestablishing the correct proportions of the facade. The BBPR instead choose a more elaborate solution, with a series of polygonal portals that are actually legible, especially at the ends of the building, as a giant order of Y-shaped supports. The infill panels alternate pink trachyte plates with glass panels, mounted behind the wire of the metal members. The crowning, in a first project with a lowered dome roof, is formed by a set back attic, shielded by copper veils, and covered by a pitched roof covered with the same material. From the ridge of the roof emerge the towers of the exposed reinforced concrete stairs, which have the function of bracing for the

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The Milanese office panorama

R P B

steel frame structure. Curiously, the real connection with the body of the church is managed by a portion of the building parish church designed by Luigi Caccia Dominioni, which is inserted between the apse and the Bank.

B , kAt the distribution level, the standard floor is organized in a double n body served by a central corridor to which the two circular stairwells a 9 readable from an the outside because the reinforced concrete l B arrive, 6 p them, which also function as bracing elements, that contain n -19towers r are projected oo beyond the eaves line of the polygonal pitched roof. This is fl clad in copper plates which echoes the material chosen 8 l veils of the attic. The structure is made with steel elements, the a c 95 pforbuffered i by dark glass panels alternating with pink trachyte plates, d n a

placed slightly subordinate to the uprights, so as not to Ty always interfere with the reading of the order of beams and pillars.

Typical floor plan scale 1:500

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[image 37] Image of the Chase Manhattan Bank. [image 38] Detail of the steel structure anche the curved windows.

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[image 39] Detail of the portico with the steel structure. [image 40] Detail of the windows.

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The Milanese office panorama

Palazzo di Fuoco, Minoletti, Chiodi, 1959-1962

Il cosiddetto Palazzo di Fuoco è un edificio per uffici di Milano, sito in viale Monza n. 2, all'angolo con piazzale Loreto e via Padova. A symbolic architecture of a Milan that has always been striving for change. L'edificio venne costruito dal 1959 al 1962 su progetto di Giulio Minoletti e Giuseppe Chiodi, una struttura particolare, con le facciate esterne rivestite in curtain wall in alluminio anodizzato. Il palazzo presenta tre forti elementi identificativi delle opere milanesi e di Minoletti: un basamento, un corpo centrale e un elemento verticale che corona l’edificio. Nei piani superiori erano collocati gli uffici, mentre al piano terra c’erano negozi e spazi commerciali.

> Viale Monza, 2, Milan. • OFFICES • SHOPS

[image 41] opposite page: Photo of the building.

Groundfloor scale 1:1000 The building develops on a trapezoidalshaped lot that occupies the entire available surface, thus acting as the very limit of the road.

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History Giulio Minoletti was born in 1910 in Milan, the city where he lived almost without interruption and to which he dedicated most of his work as an architect, urban planner, designer. Minoletti also designed important public buildings for Milan. Among these, the office building of the Liquigas company and the subsequent Palazzo di Fuoco can be considered two aspects of the same research. Leading themes: technology and innovation, symbols of the Milan of the boom.

[image 42] Photo of the building with the glowing neon light bands.

Located at the top of the long axis Corso Venezia-Corso Buenos Aires, it was an avant-garde building for its time, with a reinforced concrete structure and external facades covered with curtain walls in anodized aluminum. The building consisted of three buildings, outlined by two expansion joints. The first body, the one that overlooked piazzale Loreto, and visible along Corso Buenos Aires, was the main element that housed the front elevation and from which you could admire the crowning of the building. The other two bodies, the wings of the building, one higher and one lower, extended respectively on viale Monza and viale Padova. The base, represented by the first two floors above ground (ground floor and mezzanine floor), is made up of transparent faces alternating with the succession of pillars that dictate the rhythm of the structure. The central body is further back than the rest of the structure and consists of an Italian-style curtain wall, with a symmetrical step and importance of the upright and crosspiece of equal size. The building ends with the vertical body, crowning the work, resting on the top of the main body. On the ground floor are arranged commercial spaces with mezzanines and the entrance hall to the upper floors, reachable through an internal gallery that connects Viale Monza to Via Padova. The upper floors, used as offices, are eight for the side overlooking piazzale Loreto, six for the one on viale Monza and four for the one on via Padova. There are also two underground floors, the first used as a warehouse for the shops, the second for the technical systems. The building extended on all three sides with a structural curtain wall, composed of glazed modules, a single modulated frame of 685 windows, except for the ground floor and the mezzanine, which were completely transparent and detached from the floors above. thanks to the presence of a large horizontal opaque band. Uprights and transoms, made of metal, covered the entire face of the central body both horizontally and vertically. The office building was thought of as "a true architecture of light, obtained through a luminous device in the housing" 13 of the windows. The facades were in fact equipped with neon light bands that lit up in a multitude of colors during the evening hours, illuminating

The Milanese office panorama

the building and the square. This technology, at the time of great innovation and never seen before, was removed over the years and never replaced. Highly innovative and complex, both from a structural and plant engineering point of view, it was characterized by the placement, on the terrace, of a large clock, a luminous newspaper and a weather station, a metal rod and an iron sphere, now removed, very innovative elements for Europe, on which Minoletti carried out in-depth studies in the USA The systems, very advanced for the time, include the air conditioning of all the rooms, the radiant panel heating placed under the floors, the electrically operated Venetian blinds, and above all a particular colored night lighting system, from which the nickname derives. given to the building.

[13] - Accossato K. , Per la riscoperta di un protagonista del razionalismo italiano, in M. Montagna, Architetture di Giulio Minoletti, Brescia 2009, page 12-16.

Typical floor plan scale 1:500

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The Milanese office panorama

Montedoria building, Gio Ponti, 1964-1970

In 1963 Gio Ponti started designing Palazzo Montedoria, his last building in Milan, completed in 1970. After some setbacks due to the fact that the City of Milan did not approve a first design version, with a 50 metres high tower, Ponti designed a second version in line with his personal idea of architecture as a public space. The new building consists of two different bodies whose fronts follow a diagonal line along Via Pergolesi and via Doria to come to a crossroads with Piazza Caiazzo. Ponti's aim to conceive an aerial sort of architecture, dreamlike in some ways, led him to design facades with flush mount glass windows mirroring back the sky and the urban surrounding, alternating with rows of different types of shimmering green ceramic tiles, 3 embossed ones and a flat one.

> Via G. B. Pergolesi, 25, Milan. • OFFICES • SHOPS

[image 43] opposite page: Photo of the building.

Groundfloor scale 1:1000 The building occupies an entire block, triangular in shape, between Via Macchi and Pergolesi, which are perpendicular to each other, and Viale Doria, with its diagonal shape; the north-eastern corner overlooks Piazza Caiazzo.

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History La vicenda progettuale dell’edificio per gli uffici Montedoria si apre con una proposta dello studio di Ponti, presentata nel 1963, che ipotizza la costruzione di una torre di circa cinquanta metri affiancata ad un corpo di soli quattro piani su strada, in maniera simile alla casa Rasini. La proposta, scartata per via di un veto allo sviluppo in altezza imposto dal regolamentocomunale, prevedeva infatti un diverso trattamento delle cortine edilizie, con un partito ritmico delle finestre, nel blocco minore, di stampo tradizionale. La proposta non venne accettata perché non rispondente al regolamento edilizio comunale, e pertanto Ponti dal 1966 al 1968 dovette elaborare un nuovo progetto, in cui l'altezza massima era limitata a 30 metri e la cubatura distribuita più uniformemente. La configurazione planimetrica definitiva si basava invece su un unico corpo di fabbrica, articolato in due bracci disposti ai lati del lotto triangolare, che s’innestano a formare un cuneo accidentato in cui ciascun fronte assume la propria autonomia compositiva. L’edificio si affaccia su via Pergolesi a Milano e si compone di due corpi di fabbrica, tra loro adiacenti e collegati da un nucleo centrale con scale, ascensori e servizi: un corpo alto 30 metri, di otto piani più il terreno, in fregio a viale Doria, e un corpo basso di tre piani più il terreno all’angolo fra le vie Macchi e Pergolesi. Fu completata nel 1971. Il palazzo si dissocia dagli schemi architettonici tipici degli anni Sessanta. Le volumetrie costruite derivano dall’applicazione delle norme del regolamento edilizio; per ricondurre il disegno a proporzioni più felici, Ponti utilizzò un metodo già applicato in altri interventi analoghi, suddividendo la facciata principale in partizioni più piccole, mediante l’avanzamento a sbalzo di alcune aree. Le facciate lunghe sono caratterizzate da un gioco di sporgenze e rientranze, scandite dal rivestimento di piastrelle in ceramica verdi, dalla texture irregolare e con superficie liscia diamantata, qui declinato in quattro varianti (delle quali una ricorre all’uso di formelle piane), che si dispongono a formare una tessitura molto ricca, posata casualmente, in modo tale da ottenere straordinari effetti di riflessione della luce. Questi effetti sono intensificati dalle vetrate che, essendo poste a filo di facciata, riflettono il cielo. I corpi aggettanti in facciata movimento ulteriormente l’immagine del palazzo. La facciata corta, invece, presenta un linguaggio diverso, incentrato sull’uso di vetrate a tutta altezza che, svuotando il fronte, gli conferiscono notevole leggerezza visiva. Il vincolo imposto dal

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The Milanese office panorama

regolamento edilizio, che aveva impedito lo sviluppo in altezza, porta Gio Ponti a realizzare una struttura molto mossa, la cui vicenda sarà ricordata da lui stesso solo qualche anno dopo: "Quando, nella città, una facciata di un edificio è determinata nelle sue dimensioni da fattori non architettonici, tu la riduci ad una sequenza di spartizioni ben dimensionate, facciate senza la facciata … un ritmo è raggiunto". Il palazzo è destinato oggi ad uso uffici e si eleva per 9 piani fuori terra, mentre i 3 livelli interrati sono adibiti a parcheggio auto e deposito.

Typical floor plan scale 1:500

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[image 44] Image of the Montedoria building. [image 45] Detail of the klinker coating and of the windows. [image 46] opposite page: Image of the corner solution in the Montedoria building.

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The Milanese office panorama

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High-rise Milan

3. High-rise Milan

“It is its palpitating aspect in the eyes of those with the nature of an artist ... the strength and power of height, the glory and pride of exaltation.” 1

[1] - L. Sullivan, The tall building artistically considered, 1896.

The skyscraper has always represented one of the themes par excellence of modernity. Its realization has taken on a profoundly different meaning in Europe and America. After the bombings of August 1943 the city was often rebuilt with the identification of massive volumes that often reached the height of twenty floors. The most significant constructions were built between the 1950s and 1970s. Italian culture, and certainly Milan as its most advanced point of view, has often shown a certain reluctance, if not a distinct aversion, to this vertical contemporaneity. The country's economic capital has been characterized by this sort of fear, as evidenced by the public debate on whether to sprinkle the historic city with skyscrapers. In fact, a law of the fascist period imposed the Madonnina del Duomo in Milan as the highest point among the urban buildings, its primacy remained undefeated until the second postwar period, when Milan saw the first tall buildings, which we can more properly define towers, were born. skyscrapers. The Torre Littoria, also known as Torre Branca, built by Gio Ponti inside the Sempione Park, on the occasion of the V Triennale in 1933, had to limit its height to 108 meters, half a meter lower than the cathedral spire. It was Luigi Mattioni's Torre Breda in 1954, 116 meters high, to overcome this prohibition for the first time, setting a new record. The following years are characterized by several examples with different planimetric and stylistic solutions, up to the Eighties, with less interesting solutions, to then return to our days where the debate has brought new examples of architecture that are defined as the new skyscrapers of Milan.

[image 47] opposite page: BBPR, Torre Velasca, Milan, 1956-58. Protected by decree of 25th January 2012.

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A brief history

[1] - Crippa M. A., Il Grattacielo dal Secondo Dopoguerra ad Oggi, in Maria Antonietta Crippa, Ferdinando Zanzottera, Milano si Alza. Torri, Campanili e Grattacieli in Città, Istituto Gaetano Pini, Milan 2004, page 51.

The 60-meter Snia-Viscosa building in Piazza San Babila, designed by Alessandro Rimini and built between 1935 and 1937, can be considered the first Milanese skyscraper. It retains this record because it embodies the essence of the overseas archetypes of the skyscraper, thanks to its location and versatility. Since the limit height provided for by the municipal building regulations was 30 meters, it was precisely its monumental and representative value of the skyscraper, which convinced the municipal offices to allow a building in derogation. Conceived as a hinge body, it would have reconfigured the block, mediating with its volume the different heights of the different road fronts. Its self-promotional character, being a self-referential and advertising element, is able to express the customer's values: economic power, scientific-technological knowledge and attention to the years to come. The Snia building, in fact, has acquired two lots on the square under construction, to materially represent its entrepreneurial strength.

[image 48] Picture of the Tower Snia Viscosa in Corso Giacomo Matteotti, 11.

“The skyscraper can be considered as the model of the building magnificence typical of the homo faber of the twentieth century” 1.

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From an expressive point of view, the building is represented by a solid volume, characterized by a modernist language still influenced by the stylistic elements of the twentieth century. We are far from the overseas archetype, characterized by steel, glass, masonry and modularity of the plant. The Lombard tradition therefore always remains disconnected from certain characteristics prevalent abroad, showing a certain ambiguity in this regard. An example is Gio Ponti, who reinterprets the transparent wall in a personal way, but has no intention of denying the intimacy of the residence. Ponti's approach presents some references to rationalism, but articulates them in a completely original way, underlining the importance of materials, which being a weaving, give freedom to the informal composition.

[2] Irace F., Condominio milanese, Milano Moderna. Città, critica, architettura negli anni ‘50-’60, Federico Motta, Milan 1996, page 50.

Milan is characterized by a different modernity after the war, which differs from what happens overseas. The Milanese culture, in fact, "kept away from the clear fracture between past and present which, among European artists and architects, gave body to new expressive forms and housing layouts completely different from the pre-existing urban context" 2. Architects such as Luigi Moretti, Gio Ponti, Armin Meili, Eugenio and Ermenegildo Soncin, BBPR, Luigi Mattioni, Vico Magistretti, Melchiorre Bega, Lorenzo Muzio and others built most of the new Milanese skyscrapers in the years of the economic miracle. New urban landmarks within the city, most of them intended for service sector activities or with mixed use. In this panorama two great examples of possible symbolic declinations are represented by the Pirelli Tower and the Velasca Tower by Gio Ponti and Ernesto Nathan Rogers. These two emblems, almost contemporary, represent two very different examples of the "via Milanese to the tall building", and embody the two different design attitudes better than anyone. The Pirelli Tower, defined by a synthesis between structural courage and figurative refinement, represents modernity. While the Torre Velasca is the result of a design process that has nothing to do with the search for predefined and strong images, but is the evolution of a series of proposals that lead it to prefer an architecture of solids rather than voids. . The debate between these two examples has always been present and strong within architectural criticism. The Pirelli skyscraper is certainly one of the buildings that best interpret Ponti's reflections on the finished form and the need for integration between art and technique. Very important is the relationship that the skyscraper establishes with the ground, a very important foundation in the Milanese panorama, the articulation of the inclined planes gives access to the building hiding the base. The curtain wall also represents a reinterpretation of modernist internationalism, the two opaque bands on the sides that create a dialectical relationship between the solid surfaces and the

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transparent sectors. Torre Velasca, in the historic center, wants to maintain a link with the history of Milan. His imagery has led to a wrong image, where criticism has made it a formal misinterpretation. In reality, the lesson of BBPR is not far from that of Ponti, being both a reinterpretation of tall buildings in a Milanese key. According to Rogers “[...] the present is, in turn, an original creation; this does not disrupt history, but unites it with a feeling of continuity where the past is projected into present events and these, in turn, reconnect and take root in past events. Being modern simply means feeling contemporary history as part of the whole story [...]. Building a new building in an environment already characterized by other architectural works imposes the obligation to respect the existing works, which means conveying the new energy to feed the perpetuation of their vitality " 3. This was an attempt to enrich the Milanese skyline by following what was already there. The Velasca tower and the Pirelli skyscraper can be considered symbolic cases of Milan precisely because of their formal otherness, but they do not conclude a research that broadens in different directions. The Milanese professionalism includes several symbolic examples that have been able to develop innumerable interpretations. An example is the Piazza della Repubblica, where the pizza plant was designed as a monumental entrance to the heart of the city by those coming from the Central station. Precisely for this purpose the square was designed together with the presence of various soaring elements that could represent the new financial district of the city. With the exception of the Baciocchi tower from 1939, the rest were all designed after the war based on the modernist character that this area must have had. The Turati tower, built by Muzio, is one of the two volumes that the construction plan for the area identified, together with the contemporary Breda tower by Luigi Mattioni from 1955, as the gateway to the new financial district . Another great example is the Swiss Institute designed by Armin Meili between 1947 and 1952, which was located in the nearby Piazza Cavour. An emblematic case, on the other hand, is the figure of Luigi Mattioni, among his best-known buildings we find two skyscrapers: the aforementioned Breda tower and the Diaz center (1953-57). He also designed a series of skyscrapers as residential buildings, replicating the well-proven model of the Breda Tower, intended for middle-class users. In this period also the theme of the building intended exclusively for residential use becomes a field of experimentation, it becomes a tool for the interpretation of the typology of the skyscraper. Also in this case we recognize the typical Milanese intention of avoiding the serial character, this is reflected in the variegated composition of the facades that make up the different scenarios present within the city.

[3] Rogers E. N., Esperienza dell’architettura, Einaudi, Turin 1958.

[image 49] Torre Breda located in Piazza della Repubblica 32 design by Luigi Mattioni.

[image 50] opposite page: picture of Torre Velasca. [image 51] opposite page: picture of Grattacielo Pirelli.

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[image 52] Hopper, E., Office in a small city, 1953.

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A comparison between the 60s and 90s

The buildings, built after World War II in Milan, are great examples of great architects who, thanks to their different interpretations, have reconstructed the skyline of a city devastated by the bombings of the Second World War. However, if you think of the buildings that were built in the following times, between the 80s and 90s, the solutions certainly appear to be of lesser interest. In this chapter we wanted to try to analyze different case studies of tower office buildings belonging to the period from the 50s to the 90s with the aim of comparing them on a typological, stylistic and real spatial architectural quality level , and to bring out differences and similarities.

[1] - Forino, I., Uffici. Interni arredi oggetti, Piccola Biblioteca Enaudi, 2011.

The typological study was carried out over a well-defined time horizon . This period was chosen because, within this interval, we can find are several examples attributable to two macro periods: - office building from the 50s-60s: where it is possible to find famous examples of good architecture, which in addition to offering workspaces generated noteworthy spatial and architectural qualities. - office building from the 80s-90s: where the same characteristics are always recognized, the height development, the dry construction, the use of curtain walls. This therefore generated interior spaces with little internal quality, where only a few peculiarities produced interesting spaces on a spatial level. In the 1960s the office typology, not yet being a serial production, therefore still anchored to the urban fabric of the city, was architecturally valid. Later, however, in the 1980s, with the advent of information technology the office buildings moved to more peripheral areas of the city; with the mass production of construction techniques it has therefore come to examples of dubious quality. The study wanted to generate a comparison between the two periods. So we tried to find the spatial quality inside these buildings, created to host scenarios "of daily relationships between people, a favorite place of self-determination and overwhelming they reflect social tensions and hierarchies ”. 1

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Torre Galfa, M. Bega, 1956-1959

“Galfa” is an acronym coined by the designers, blending the first syllables of the names of the two streets (via Galvani and via Fara) at the intersection of which the building stands, as part of a plan for the construction of a new Business District never fully realized. It was commissioned by Sarom, an oil company, processing and sale of hydrocarbons founded in 1950 by Attilio Monti, who then sold it to the Banca Popolare di Milano. Progressively abandoned, the tower in 2012 was the scene of an occupation by a Milanese art group, known as Macao. After the property has launched an architectural redevelopment project that started in 2014, to transform offices into luxury residences.

> Angolo via Galvani, via Fara, Milan. • OFFICES

[image 7] opposite page: Photo of the Torre Galfa.

Masterplan scale 1:5.000

• Typology: tower • Height : 103 m • n° of floors : 31 + 2 underground • Structure: reinforced concrete

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[image 8] Detail of the curtain wall of the facade.

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The building, a rectangular-shaped tower measuring 18x30 meters, is spread over thirty-one floors above ground - for a total of 103 meters - and two underground, which house technical facilities and parking lots. The structure is in reinforced concrete made up of six differently oriented partitions that thin and forks upwards and from the complex of the vertical bearing walls in correspondence with stairs and elevators. These elements are set back from the edge of the façades by a measure of 2.50 meters, which allows designers to create a continuous curtain wall along the façades themselves. The unusual transparency of the glass helps to determine the extremely rarefied image of the tower, which dematerializes the corners and, in this way, recovers one of the most important lessons of the International Style . The two long elevations have profoundly different characteristics: one is completely glass and the other highlights the structure on the facade, covering it with porcelain stoneware tiles. The east front is made through a continuous glass facade and is characterized by the staggered plane of the black uprights above the silver texture of the windows. The west front, on the other hand, is characterized by the concrete structure placed in correspondence with the lifts, covered in 2 x 2 cm gray stoneware. The two short elevations are also the same and opposite: they are covered with tiles alternating with windowed parts, but the portion of the two components is complementary. The frames, made of anodized duralumin, follow a particular rhythm that offsets the alignment of the vertical uprights, painted black to contrast them with the silver of the fixed frames. To maintain the linearity of this design, Bega and its collaborators also created an innovative air conditioning system, with the necessary appliances embedded in the thickness of the slabs. The last two levels of the tower - also for the most part intended for installations - are smaller than the underlying volume and are therefore surrounded by a continuous balcony, which creates a shadow gap between the actual flat roof and the last habitable floor of the skyscraper. The base is instead made up of a low body of two floors, in which common spaces are placed such as the atrium and an auditorium. The distribution of the offices is entrusted to a central path, accessible from the block of the stairs and elevators which, placed in the central span, are closed by load-bearing concrete walls reflected on the outside in a blind portion of the rear front.

High-rise Milan

The internal spatiality

In the Bega tower, through a careful design of the partitions of the facade, it calibrates and composes the interiors and exteriors in a unitary way, without ever connoting the building of rigidity: the facade “dresses” the building without imposing itself and reveals the internal spatiality on the office function for which it was intended. The use of light precisely as a design principle is one of the aspects that emerge most forcefully: the building requires separation partitions, functional to the use of the rooms. The internal architecture is entirely consistent with the external one: the spaces follow each other around the fifth-pillars, avoiding the annoying division into watertight cells and confirming with the internal spatial unit, the volumetric one that characterizes the exterior with such clarity. The coeval conception that sees open space as an almost dogma rule of office building design is evident. In those years, on the basis of the American model, typological studies were born on the space intended for offices, based on the concept of modularity and maximum flexibility. These results were obtained with the use of modular mobile dividing diaphragms. Bega’s primary goal was to create environments that improve working conditions. Within this perspective, the study of furniture became essential. Today almost all the furniture has been lost, except for the walnut boiserie that covers the walls of the 28th floor. The internal linings of the reinforced concrete stairs are plaster and marble, those of the service stairs are ceramic. On each floor, the floors of the rooms were made of rubber and linoleum, those of the ground floor in beige marble, those of the boardroom were in dark brown carpet. The building has not undergone substantial changes or changes in finishes in the claddings, except for the flooring of the offices which, following the takeover of Banca Popolare di Milano, were covered with an elevated flooring for the passage of the plant networks. [image 53] Picture of the glass edge inside the building. [image 54] Picture of the interior space and the forniture.

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Gemini Center, R. Gates, R. Morisi, 1988-1993

The Gemini Center is a complex of buildings located in the Milanese district of Lorenteggio, almost on the border with the municipality of Corsico. The complex is formed by two towers 96 meters high for 21 floors. The two towers, whose construction was completed in 1995, were designed by the architects Rolando Gantes and Roberto Morisi.

> Via Robert Koch 1, Milan. • OFFICES

Interior design: A. Butté, P. Tatavitto

[image 11] opposite page: Photo of the Gemini Towers.

Masterplan scale 1:5.000

• Typology: tower • Height : 96 m • n° of floors : 21 + 2 underground • Structure: reinforced concrete

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[image 55] Photo of the two towers. [image 56] Photo of the two towers and the common groundfloor.

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The Center consists of two twin towers oriented on a 45° inclined axis, each of 21 floors above ground, including 19 floors with offices and 2 floors at the top, partly used for exhibition and meeting spaces and partly for technical volumes, for a total height of 96 meters. A third multi-faceted building complete functionally and connects the two towers on the ground floor. The archive rooms and parking lots for 322 cars are located in the two underground floors. The workstations are inserted in large open-spaces area and the auxiliary meeting rooms and relative common spaces are placed along all the perimeter of the building. Management offices and training classrooms are instead configured as closed. Crystal walls, ideal for exploiting natural light, are used on all eleven floors even in the most internal areas. A special feature of the two skyscrapers is the presence of two cranes positioned (for cleaning the windows) on the top of the two towers and at the structural level it is that for the first 15 floors the two towers are connected to each other with glass walkways. The skyscraper currently houses offices for rent.

[image 57] Picture of the entrance. [image 58] Picture of the working area.

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Centro Svizzero, A. Meili, G. Romano, 1942-1952

The Swiss Center is a business complex in Milan, located in Piazza Cavour. Known in particular for its tower of 80 meters, it was the tallest skyscraper in the city from 1952 to around 1954, when it was passed by the Breda Tower in Piazza della Repubblica. It consists of two separate bodies: the so-called Lower House, four floors high, which forms the street front on Piazza Cavour and the connecting element with the pre-existing building of Via Palestro, and the Tower of 21 floors, placed more entirely. Architects were the Swiss Armin Meili and the Italian Giovanni Romano.

> Via Palestro 2-4, Milan. • OFFICES

Interior design: A. Butté, P. Tatavitto

[image 16] opposite page: Photo of the Swiss complex.

Masterplan scale 1:5.000

• Typology: line + tower • Height : 21 m and 80 m • n° of floors : 4 + 21 • Structure: reinforced concrete

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[image 59] Detail of the north facade of the lower body, the linear building. [image 60] Detail of the material of the lower body. [image 61] Photo of the tower.

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Located in an area overlooking the public gardens of via Palestro, the center replaces the headquarters of the Swiss Society in via dei Disciplini, destroyed during the war, and houses the consulate, the tourist office and ample space for the Swiss community of Milan, as well as numerous offices leased. Designed by Armin Meili, it was built by the Gadola company under the direction of Giovanni Romano using funds allocated directly by the Swiss Confederation. Both architects had been invited in 1947 to a restricted competition organized by the Swiss Society, for which they drafted several project variants. Beside a first proposal, which respected the altimetric and volumetric prescriptions of the current town plan, the architect presented to the town planning commission headed by Mario Venanzi a solution articulated in a continuous low body, located along piazza Cavour and via Palestro and in a block in twentyone-storey rectangular tower, separated from the previous one and overlooking a private courtyard open on Via del Politecnico, according to a scheme comparable to that used in the same years by Piero Bottoni in corso Buenos Aires. The low building is spread over five floors above ground and two underground, occupied by common services such as the boiler room, the water and electricity plant. The first and second levels were intended for representative offices of Swiss commercial activities in Milan, while the last two were the headquarters of the Swiss Society Club, used for parties, performances and concerts that welcomed up to six hundred people in a double-height hall, connected to a library with reading room, game rooms and billiards, administration spaces and the terrace. The tower has a load-bearing skeleton in reinforced concrete with service units for stairs and elevators on the sides and brick floors. The structure is based on a 3.6 m module for optimal organization of the interior spaces. The curtain wall of the main elevations is anodized aluminum and is concluded by a glass curtain that can be opened for two floors, which creates a belvedere over the city. The last three levels were instead the seat of a restaurant, with a panoramic terrace paved with a mosaic in multicolored stone cubes by the sculptor Alberto Salvioni. The mosaic takes up the motifs of a similar work carried out, also by Salvioni, in the courtyard on which the tower stands, under which a garage for thirty vehicles has been created. On the façade, both the tower restaurant and the headquarters of the Club of the Swiss Society are easily identifiable thanks to the insertion of continuous bands of double-height windows, with anodized aluminum uprights and two sheets of glass with an interposed air chamber. The facades, on the other hand, are clad in strips of Carrara

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High-rise Milan

Torri Garibaldi, L. Lazzari, G. Perrotta, 1984-1992

The two of the former management center of the Garibaldi station, built between 1985 and 1994 on a project by architects Laura Lazzari and Giancarlo Perrotta for the State Railways, are part of that phase of the city of Milan aimed at transforming itself into an international city and therefore to change his face and traditions.

> Piazza Freud, Milan. • OFFICES

[image 21] opposite page: Photo of thetwo towers.

Masterplan scale 1:5.000

• Typology: tower • Height : 124 m • n° of floors : 24 • Structure: reinforced concrete

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[image 62] Photo of the two towers, one already renovated. [image 63] Photo of tower number two.

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The elevated buildings consisted of a central supporting structure consisting of a reinforced concrete core around which six elevators and two end goods elevators were positioned adjacent to two smoke-tight staircases. The walking slabs were connected to the central core, thanks to special metal formworks. The internal distribution featured repeated office modules on all floors, except the twenty-fourth, where the plants were located. The two towers were also connected to each other by a walkway on the fifth floor, as well as the floor of the centralized concierge. The complex was finished with a curtain wall in anodized aluminum and ended with a corrugated sheet covering directly applied to the iron structure.

[6] -Peressut, B., Bellini, L., Milano: architetture per la citta : 1980-1990, Editoriale Domus, Milano, 1989, page 61. [7] - Frampton, K., New York’s, Narcosis, Monaco, 1989, page 47.

Internally the buildings presented a mudular design of rationalist matrix that contrasted with the language used on the facade. The internal divisions were mostly made with movable walls that guaranteed happiness. The different functional areas were differentiated by the flooring: the offices in ceramic stoneware, the service areas in single-fired tiles. The base, on the other hand, was representative, in particular the porter's lodge, paved with limbara and serizzo pink granite, and enriched with Venetian stucco walls; the stairs were made of Botticino marble and limbara granite. The buildings had an impact thanks to the language used on the façade, made with double glazing, reflective tempered glass with heat-insulating panel for the opaque areas, and GRC panels, which gave the buildings a geometry broken by the crowning gables. The GRC panels, a variant of the original project, were colored with three different shades: pink beige, light ocher and very light brick, a choice linked to the desire for contextualization of the building, the shades in fact recalled "the traditional environment of nineteenthcentury Milan" 6 They also emphasized the vertical thrust of the two towers, the play of contrast between the double glazing and reflective tempered glass, which instead marked the horizontal bands. In perfect harmony with post-modern principles, the towers therefore had their expressive fulcrum in the façade, in which the “stupendous vulgarity” 7 of post-modern language was expressed. Due to serious structural problems, the two towers underwent a renovation and restyling project in 2008, commissioned to the architect Massimo Roj. Today, therefore, the two towers have a formal interpretation that is completely antithetical to the aesthetics proposed by Lazzari and Perrotta, they have become two high-tech glass boxes, where contrasted with the original materiality we have a progressive dematerialization effect.

[image 64] Hand drawn elevation of the two towers.

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High-rise Milan

New buildings and heritage

For 50 years the Pirelli skyscraper, symbol of reconstruction, affectionately called "Pirellone" by the Milanese, remained the tallest skyscraper in Italy with its 127 m and 31 floors. The 2000s marked a turning point for Milan as regards high-rise buildings. If before the skyscrapers represented a non-recurring element in Milan, today the situation is no longer the same. In recent years, new architectures have joined the historic Pirellone and have significantly changed the city skyline: the three City Life Towers, the famous Bosco Verticale, next to it the less known Torre Solea, and the Torre Solaria, both buildings with apartments of luxury, in the new area of Porta Nuova, between viale della Liberazione and via Galilei is the Diamond Tower. If initially Milan, like all our country, showed a certain hostility towards that type coming from overseas, today the ideal has drastically changed, the new influences and needs have given way to numerous projects of new towers that are gaining ground within the city. Today, with its 231 meters, the title of tallest skyscraper is the Unicredit Tower, built as part of the Porta Nuova District project, designed by the architect Cesar Pelli and inaugurated in 2014 as the Headquarters of the Credit Institute. A new symbol of Milanese modernity, the tower, entirely in glass and steel, overlooks Piazza Gae Aulenti from above, immediately assuming the role of an icon with its innovative sinuous shape and the recognizable spire on the top, a sort of spiral element that tapers to points upwards. Its construction is part of one of the most important urban redevelopment projects in Europe, the project for the new smart district of Porta Nuova, from the Garibaldi station to the Isola district. The massive urban regeneration project called "Milan Porta Nuova" has transformed an abandoned and degraded area into a new financial center for decades. The area has also become a new social aggregator as well as a tourist attraction thanks to the now very famous Piazza Gae Aulenti, the large well-kept green area full of cultural initiatives and the new luxury residential skyscrapers. The projects that are being launched in the areas of Garibaldi, Porta Nuova, City Life have given rise to great transformations in the city, new attractive poles not only for workers, but also for tourists and for the inhabitants of other areas of the city. These new developments are attracting the interest of a foreign

[image 65] Photo of Piazza Gae Aulenti in Milan. (@simonedaino95)

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[1] interview of Consonni G., Cambia lo skyline ma nei quartieri chiusi crescono le solitudini", Corriere della Sera, November 2019. [2] ibidem.

public, the Porta Nuova area is in fact enjoying increasing interest and attracting many investors. Furthermore, this has led to the birth of new office towers, buildings that concentrate the various operating offices of a company in a single point of the city. Real new business centers, headquarters, well-known examples are: the UniCredit tower, the Libeskind tower, PwC headquarters, the Allianz tower, the Generali tower ... and many more. Within the city, therefore, there is an articulated mosaic of removals or headquarters settlements of large international groups that for some years have been redesigning not only the skyline of the city, but also the geography of the Milan of business and affairs. These new architectures of concrete and glass, with the most twisted shapes, seem to directly absorb overseas influence and respond to the new needs that 2020 requires, needs for space, energy and innovation. Despite these new redevelopments have received numerous titles and appreciation from all over the world, the question remains whether this is the right path for the city of Milan. "It seems to me a confirmation of what Milan has been doing for some time: it is walking along the road of homologation to the dominant metropolises of West and Southeast Asia. Sealed skyscrapers are built, illuminated in the evening but which in reality are a deathbed ". 1 "The leap forward of the city in the last 15 years expresses its power, deserves to be looked at with respect. But the new forms betray its history, made up of measure and human relationships. On the other hand, architecture does not lie: the new skyline (...) is detached from the suburbs and the metropolitan system". 2

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New needs Nowadays needs have changed and this has led to new demands on the real estate market for office buildings. Sustainability and new spatial models, more fluid and flexible, are the basis of the current market. Sustainability, first of all, plays an increasingly fundamental role in the design of offices. Designers and companies today must respond to new energy and performance requirements. This leads to the construction of new buildings, less expensive than the possible reuse of existing buildings. Skyscrapers, covered with glass, which in a few years have changed the skyline of Milan.

[3] The Great Recession was a world economic crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2013 that broke out in the United States of America in 2006 following the subprime crisis and the real estate market.

Disused asset of offices These new buildings, in addition to changing the image of Milan, have led to a new heritage of abandoned buildings that adds to the existing one, following the crisis of 2008, a phenomenon that some scholars have defined as "great contraction" 3. Within this scenario, we can observe how the great majority of empty office buildings are represented by those that are regularly on the market, but that have not been able to find a tenant for more or less time. Looking at the locations of the buildings in the real estate advertisements, it is evident that most of the unused buildings fall within the business districts of Milan: Bovisa, Bicocca, Maciachini, Farini, Stephenson, Certosa, Mecenate-Tofetti-Rogoredo, San Donato, Vigentino, Missaglia, Lorenteggio (...). These buildings today represent a real opportunity, an opportunity for the future of the city, a possible solution linked to various problems present today. Furthermore, they could involve numerous redevelopment processes of forgotten and degraded areas in the suburbs of the city. These processes could also answer the question of housing demand in the city, a problem linked to the saturation of Milan and the other rental prices present.

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4. The Milanese speculative model

Today in Milan we can see ghost districts, abandoned or even never finished buildings, failed works even before being placed on the market. These buildings, today a symbol of wrong planning, were built in the city between the mid-80s and the 90s. They are part of the maximum building speculation that ended up in Milanese decay due to an excess of greed. In this frame of time, Milan was in a profound phase of change, as, after the war, it went gradually to a trasformation, from an industrial city into a city of services, finance, advertising and fashion. This was a period of transition that actually moved the new building interventions to the periphery. In 1978, in fact, 50% of the industrial areas could be dedicated to the tertiary sector even if not directly connected to the industrial activity present in the area itself. The exploitation of cheap properties, the easily obtained permits and a standard design, in concrete and mirrored glass, without a real design, led to the production of as many square meters as possible in vertical and horizontal boxes. The old disused factories or the disused agricultural fields disappeared and and gave way to the proliferation of new identical buildings, unfortunately often speculative and lacking of a good design. In those years we clearly see a speculation of the type of office buildings.They were built all over the city despite the clear indications of the planners of the too large number of office buildings in the city. We see a lot of risky investments, especially in the tertiary sector, such as many agglomerations of 4-6 twin towers built in the 1980s by the builder Salvatore Ligresti, often left unused or abandoned after a few years. [image 66] opposite page: "Periferie plurali" drawing by Valentina Galluccio.

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There was therefore an overabundance with respect to real needs. Banks and builders continued to build as if nothing had happened to this day, bringing the number of empty offices to a very high level. These standard architectures, also generated by obvious urban planning errors, have given rise, in the city and in the hinterland, to uninhabited neighborhoods, where now you can see and feel the concrete , it's everywhere. Tens of thousands of square meters of rural areas transformed and then abandoned, never started industrial areas, an obvious example is located in the Parco Sud area. In Milan, the phenomenon of the disposal of industrial surfaces is presented with a delay compared to the European ones, with very different quantitative and qualitative characteristics. The large abandoned areas are located in the most peripheral areas of the city and are those that have historically been the cornerstones of Milan's industrial urbanization.

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Focus on Ligresti's investments

This Milanese chapter includes Salvatore Ligresti, real estate developer and financier, who died in May 2018 at the age of 85. Already in 1985 he was nicknamed “mister five percent” for his propensity to participate with very low percentages in the activities of a multitude of companies and banks. The same inclination that drove him to buy scattered plots of land, even small and often of little value, but always in strategic locations in the city.

[1] Elli S., Chiedi chi era Ligresti: ascesa e declino del vicerè di Milano, 2018. www.ilsole24ore.com

"If there is a suitable adjective to describe Salvatore Ligresti's parable, it is "transversal". He was transversal to time, which he punctuated by adapting to all its changes; to the space, which was physically occupied with its unmistakable towers; to politics, which he rode with dexterity, at least until the outbreak of "mani pulite".1 Active in Milan since the early 1960s, over the years he managed to enter various sectors, including the construction once. Thanks to his friendship with Michelangelo Virgillito, then owner of Liquigas, the Industrial Insurance Company (SAI), it passed into the hands of Ligresti and with this the engineer also obtained control of an industrial ceramic production business. The industry is PozziGinori, the result of a merger which took place in 1975 between Pozzi and the Richard-Ginori Italian Ceramic Society. From the moment in which Ligresti controlled SAI and Pozzi-Ginori, a new era begun for Milan. These were the years in which the new city plan was discussed, which was then approved by the Municipality in 1978. Although industrial activities have already been showing signs of crisis for some years, the junta, after various discussions with the trade unions, confirms the industrial destination of the areas occupied by the factories (one thousand seven hundred hectares) and adds another one hundred and sixty areas for production activities, declaring that it will thus protect the working class component of the city. With the new regulations in the areas classified as industrial there was also a rise from twenty to fifty percent of building land for use in the service sector. Thirty percent of this share can be allocated to the service sector not directly connected with the main production activity. All this leads to the proliferation of new pseudo "business centers" within many more or less abandoned industrial areas, glass towers in the midst of abandoned factories.

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[2] Stefanoni F., Le mani su Milano. Gli oligarchi del cemento da Ligresti all’Expo, 2014.

According to Federico Oliva, a recently deceased architect and urban planner, the new plan would have triggered "the proliferation of mini-business centers within many more or less abandoned industrial areas, glass towers in the midst of abandoned factories [...]". The numerous cases are evident: the Richard-Ginori along via Ludovico il Moro, the Cartiere di Verona in via dei Missaglia, the old industrial settlements along via Cavriana, in the area of viale Forlanini and via Stephenson, at the entrance to the city of the Motorways North. In 1985, just at the moment when the scandal broke out for some agricultural areas owned by Ligresti on which the Municipality was supposed to build new housing estates, the engineer was crowned by the press as the "king of bricks". "In Milan, the brick is now the absolute protagonist: 80 % of the new service sector is his work, he has works underway for two million and three hundred thousand cubic meters; Ligresti construction sites in the city are thirty-six as well as twelve of the twenty-three construction companies operating in the area. He is trusted above all by investors such as pension funds of banks and private social security institutions, who buy almost everywhere. And if certain structures remain unsold and empty for years, sometimes for decades, it doesn't matter: they act as a guarantee to build others ".2 The outcome of the Ligresti operations is clearly visible throughout the municipal area: the now famous twin towers dot various entry points into the city. The exploitation of cheap real estate, easy permissions, and a mindless standard design in concrete and mirror glass that sought to produce as many as possible square meters

[image 67] Picture of Salvatore in court in Milan in 1988.

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in vertical boxes. These glass boxes have become the signposts of Milanese sprawl. Some of the towers have been empty since their construction. The Ligresti affair is not an isolated case but represents the paradigm of a typically Italian urban practice, developed especially in the post-war period, which allows to the entrepreneur to make his rapacious entrepreneurial climb. A central position is in fact held by the privileged interlocutors of entrepreneurship, that is the municipal administrations that entrust to private individuals, through negotiations of various kinds, a large part of the Milanese peripheral area for urbanization. All this has generated ghost neighborhoods, dozens of whole new buildings entirely uninhabited, empty glass boxes where the container was more important than the content. These buildings are still there today, waiting for a new destiny.

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The Milanese speculative model

Ligresti’s towers in the city Rather high buildings, between ten and twenty floors, not really slender, entirely covered with mirrored glass tending to blue or more often brown: these are the office towers built by Salvatore Ligresti between the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 90s in Milan and which earned him, since 1985, the title of “king of the brick”. Never alone, always in clusters of three, five, seven, sometimes even eight, they spread throughout the city of Milan. Located on the edge of the city, or rather at its entrances, the towers are clearly visible and recognizable. From any entrance to the city, coming from the hinterland, the towers are clearly visible and recognizable. Their visibility from the main road axes, over the years, has made them a well-known symbol within the city, becoming a real “landmark” for the Milanese people. The towers are characterized by the unmistakable architectural composition, a sort of automatic / standard architecture consisting of a concrete parallelepiped covered with mirrored windows, always juxtaposed by an external compartment for the emergency stairs. They were built with the intention of being used in the tertiary sector, but actually this building were a speculation on the typology of office buildings in different parts of the city. The reasons for the failure of these buildings can be traced back to several factors: » certainly the low building quality and aesthetics that made them a recognizable element » the random location within industrial areas, » and the poor accessibility, due to the inadequate collective transport connections. Some of these buildings were never even finished, while others have been abandoned over the years. This is because the tertiary sector in Milan did not produce as many jobs and internet use in the 1990s and 2000s significantly reduced the need for office buildings over the same period.

[image 68] opposite page: Photos of different towers in the city of Milan

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Spring 1988, completion for the establishment of companies and office areas in the “Torri Ligresti” of Viale Richard, next to the Don Lorenzo Milani overpass. The complex of directional and tertiary areas was built over the land of a portion of the former Richard Ginori / Pozzi Ginori factories, officially closed due to sector crisis after being taken over by Salvatore Ligresti's real estate group. The construction of the four towers took four years (July 1984-summer 1988) and took place in violation of the pre-existing PRG which provided for industrial and artisanal real estate destinations for this area.

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[image 69] "Milano Barona", picture of the towers of Viale Richard in 1988.

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Typical floor plan $

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'("'$%&

The Milanese speculative model

Main characteristics of the towers The tower all have an unmistakable architectural composition consisting of a parallelepiped of mirrored glass, normally from 30 up to 60 meters high. The main feature is the square plan with a central concrete lift core, and big concrete pillars: 1 x 1 m. The core includes an internal staircase, two lifts and a freight elevator, the towers are also accessible from an external compartment emergency staircase. Most all of the towers are characterized by one / two empty floors crowning the building, which let the possibility of increasing the built volume. One imporant characteristic is the orientation, all the towers have the angles oriented following the cardinal axes. The towers also have two underground parking floors, accessible to cars from one ramp for each tower, positioned in the outdoor area. Usually the outdoor area, where the various complexes of towers are located, is fenced. The substantial difference is represented by the base which changes according to the area in which we find ourselves. This part of the building, present in all the towers, generally acts as a connecting part between the clusters of towers, but we have exceptions when the towers are close but not directly connected. These bases also assumes particular shapes and geometries, generally not in line with the axes and orientation of the towers. Slight differences are related to the windows of which we find two variants: continuous windows where the pillars are hidden by the facade or windows rounded outwards, from pillar to pillar.

Illustration "copy & paste" facade of the towers.

The colors used for the finishing details change according to the area, sometimes red, sometimes green, other times simply gray, also the color of the glass parts of the facade present differences.

opposite page: typical floor plan of the towers, scale 1:300

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Localization Analyzing the history of this buildings we mapped all the locations were this towers are located in the Milanese area and we analyzed the main characteristic of each area. The mapping includes:

» » » » » » » »

a complex of 7 towers with a common base in Via Tucidide, a complex of 2 towers with different connecting elements in Via Cavriana, a complex of 5 towers with their base in Via Ramusio; a complex of 2 single towers and their base in Via D'Ascanio, a complex of 2 towers similar to the previous one in Via Bugatti; a complex of 5 towers and a single base in Via Richard; a complex of 4 towers with their base in Via Lorenteggio; a complex of 5 towers and their basement in Via Stephenson along the north-west route that today leads to Expo.

As we can see by the map all the areas are located on the borders of the city, near some of the major entrances to the city centre, high ways and also train tracks. This location where disused agricultural fields, or industrial areas that never started. All this areas are also located near green parts, like the Parco Agricolo Sud. Now this areas are imporant crucial point for the future of the city. If redeveloped and aincluded within a new development plan of the city, it could become the right opportunity to create new detached but at the same time connected centers for the citizens of Milan. A new possibile starting point.

opposite page: Map of Milan with the localization of the Ligresti's towers.

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Axonometry of the area

The Milanese speculative model

Via Tucidide 56

Via Tucidide is located in the Ortica district, on the eastern outskirts of the city, one of the historic Milanese districts; at the beginning part of the municipality of Lambrate and gradually transformed by the events of the twentieth century, which made it become a part of Milan: from a rural area to the settlement of large and mediumsized factories, with the development of homes. On the edge of via Tucidide we have the former complex of the historic Richard-Ginori factory at Ortica. The former pottery factory, one of Richard Ginori's city plants, was subsequently purchased by a company that decided to convert the premises into about 500 lofts, initially for sale, then for rent. The complex of 7 glass towers, 44 meters high, is on the edge of the district, between the industrial area, the beginning of the agricultural park and the high-speed road links. The 11-storey towers are connected by a common base that extends from the ground floor to the second floor terrace.

Ortica Area scale 10.000

Characteristic of the complex: #number of towers: 7 #height: 44 m #floors: 11 #Tower in use: 5 1/2 - La Feltrinelli - Stock S.r.l. - Cairo Pubblicità - BT Italia #Tower not in use: 1 1/2

Characteristics of the area:

green

100

fields

100

industries

100

residential

100

highways

100

railroads

100

[image 70] Aerial photo of Via Tucidite.

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Axonometry of the area

The Milanese speculative model

Via Cavriana 20

Via Cavriana is located in the Zone 4 district of Milan, Forlanini. The district is located in the eastern part of the city, immediately south of viale Forlanini, the major axis leading to Linate airport. It lies between the railway belt, via Mecenate and the eastern ring road. The urban layout is one of the first examples of neighborhoods surrounded by greenery, due to the fragmentation of the location of the buildings and equipment. Right here is also one of the largest parks in the city of Milan, the Forlanini Park. The complex is made up of 2 37-meter high towers spread over 12 floors. The towers are joined by a long common base, by three terraces-bridges at high altitude and by the roof.

Forlanini Area scale 10.000

Characteristic of the complex: #number of towers: 2 #height: 37 m #floors: 12 #Tower in use: 2 - IW Bank #Tower not in use: 0

Characteristics of the area:

green

100

fields

100

industries

100

residential

100

highways

100

railroads

100

[image 71] Aerial photo of Via Cavriana.

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Axonometry of the area

The Milanese speculative model

Via Giovanni Battista Ramusio 2

The towers of Via Giovanni Battista Ramusio are located in the Vigentino district, a district of Milan, located on the southern outskirts of the city, belonging to Municipality 5. The historic core of Vigentino develops along via Ripamonti, a street next to the area. The main public transports serving the neighborhood are tram 24 and buses 34 and 95. The complex is made up of 4 distinct 40 meter high towers. Each of them has a base, of regular shape, which goes from the ground floor to the second floor. Although located on the edge of the city, this area is surrounded by greenery and unlike most areas, it is far from the noise of the roads at high speed. Vigentino Area scale 10.000

Characteristic of the complex: #number of towers: 5 #height: 40 m #floors: 13 #Tower in use: 3 - Guardia di Finanza - INPS - Nexterua srl #Tower not in use: 2

Characteristics of the area:

green

100

fields

100

industries

100

residential

100

highways

100

railroads

100

[image 72] Aerial photo of Via Ramusio.

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Axonometry of the area

The Milanese speculative model

Via Corradino d'Ascanio 3-4

The towers of Via Corradino d'Ascanio are located in the Gratosoglio district, a district and an ancient parish of Milan, located on the southern outskirts of the city, belonging to Municipality 5. Previously a rural village. The Gratosoglio district is lapped from north to south by the Via dei Missaglia, an important radial artery that connects Milan to the southern part of its metropolitan city. The towers, 30 meters high, are two and are separate, each of them has a regular base of two floors and a parking in front.

Gratosoglio Area scale 10.000

Characteristic of the complex: #number of towers: 2 #height: 30 m #floors: 9 #Tower in use: 0 #Tower not in use: 2

Characteristics of the area:

green

100

fields

100

industries

100

residential

100

highways

100

railroads

100

[image 73] Aerial photo of Via d'Ascanio.

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Axonometry of the area

The Milanese speculative model

Via Ettore Bugatti 12-15

The towers of Via Ettore Bugatti are not far from those of Via Corradino d'Ascanio, they too are therefore in the Gratosoglio district. They have the same characteristics as the neighboring ones, the element that changes and shapes itself along the roads is the base.

Gratosoglio Area scale 10.000

Characteristic of the complex: #number of towers: 2 #height: 30 m #floors: 9 #Tower in use: 1 1/2 - Faber System #Tower not in use: 1 1/2

Characteristics of the area:

green

100

fields

100

industries

100

residential

100

highways

100

railroads

100

[image 74] Aerial photo of Via Bugatti.

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Axonometry of the area

The Milanese speculative model

Viale Giulio Richard 1-3-5-7

In viale Giulio Richard, in San Cristoforo sul Naviglio, there are, in the Richard complex, once the Richard Ginori ceramics factory, four 15-storey towers, plus a top floor transformed into a terrace, in line along viale Giulio Richard side by side from three smaller towers of only 6 floors. The area is located in the Romolo - San Cristoforo district, once the site of several factories, but which over the years has undergone profound changes that have led it to become one of the most loved places by artists. In fact, the area has become home to lofts, ateliers, shops. The world of design and fashion are gradually moving to this area of the canal. The tower complex is located in front of the overpass and acts as the edge of the block and as a barrier element. The back of the area is therefore enclosed by the towers themselves and fenced on the sides, it is an area used for underground parking.

San Cristoforo sul Naviglio Area scale 10.000

Characteristic of the complex: #number of towers: 4 + 3 #height: 59 m - 22 m #floors: 16 - 6 #Tower in use: 5 - Alcon Italia Spa - WiPP - Aedes SIIQ -Unicredit #Tower not in use: 2

Characteristics of the area:

green

100

fields

100

industries

100

residential

100

highways

100

railroads

100

[image 75] Aerial photo of Viale Richard.

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Axonometry of the area

The Milanese speculative model

Via Lorenteggio 257

The Via Lorenteggio complex is located in the district of the same name in Milan, located south-west of the center, belonging to Municipality 6. It has the typical ambivalence of the peripheral areas: an excellent place to live, being an area very rich in services and well connected with the center and the hinterland, where the houses have more affordable costs than the inner circle. Former workingclass area now undergoing redevelopment, Lorenteggio and its twin neighborhood Giambellino have a very particular urban fabric, including elegant buildings and public housing. The towers in this area are 4 and they are 59 meters high. They have a single common base three floors high. All towers are located in a functioning gated complex.

Lorenteggio Area scale 10.000

Characteristic of the complex: #number of towers: 4 #height: 59 m #floors: 15 #Tower in use: 4 - Infostrada - E-Care #Tower not in use: x

Characteristics of the area:

green

100

fields

100

industries

100

residential

100

highways

100

railroads

100

[image 76] Aerial photo of Via Lorenteggio.

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Axonometry of the area

The Milanese speculative model

Via Privata Polonia 10

The Via Privata Polonia complex is located in the Stephenson district, located in the northern part of Milan, adjacent to Expo Village 2015, the ancient Musocco and the Sacco district. The proximity to one of Milan's most innovative hubs: the Stephenson area is within walking or cycling distance of Expo Village 2015, which in the next few years will become MIND - Milan Innovation District, a new district dedicated to science and innovation. The area is mainly dedicated to industries, some no longer functional or abandoned. The district is not far from the Vialba and Roserio districts, well served and full of commercial activities, in addition to the Cascina Merlata area with the Expo Village. The complex consists of 5 towers 55 meters high, the towers are grouped into a complex of 3 towers, with a common base of two floors and a complex of 2 towers, always with the same base. The area is surrounded by a fence that separates it from the other blocks and on the back there is a linear parking lot.

Stephenson Area scale 10.000

Characteristic of the complex: #number of towers: 4 #height: 55 m #floors: 14 #Tower in use: 2 - Hub Hotel - Squatted: Aldo Dice 26x1 #Tower not in use: 4

Characteristics of the area:

green

100

fields

100

industries

100

residential

100

highways

100

railroads

100

[image 77] Aerial photo of Via Polonia.

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The Milanese speculative model

The chance given by the heritage

We have underlined how the milanese scenario is characterized by a significant number of abandoned industrial areas. In Milan, the problem of the unsold or abandoned tertiary sector is destined to become one of the central themes of the future transformation of the city. The basic question with which it is necessary to deal with is how to reuse these possibilities of reuse of industrial areas in the general interest and not just business. A project for the overall reuse of the city starting from the reuse of disused areas, implies the redefinition of the regulatory instruments for its implementation, in the sense of having rules and plans that allow greater flexibility on the contents and greater rigidity and transparency in procedures. The city of Milan has been experiencing a new phase for some years now. These last few years have been characterized by major transformations that are trying to place the city within a scenario of global competitiveness. These new transformations come to life mostly from abandoned areas, very often industrial, different in size and characteristics, located in more or less strategic areas of the city. On the one hand, these are complex transformations, the understanding of which passes through the reconstruction of the network of actors involved and the stages that led to their definition, and on the other hand, minor transformations, even dimensional ones, characterized by more linear processes, happened almost on the sly. A set of transformations, therefore, with an overall significant and extremely visible urban impact. The emergence of the problem has already been reflected in the press in the past, but without giving a real concrete answer. Already in 2014 the issue had entered the agenda of the municipal administration, finally interested in finding solutions for the recovery or conversion of this heritage: "Low cost houses in empty offices". 1 This disused heritage could therefore be a real opportunity for a widespread recovery of these buildings and their conversion. The conversion to a different use can be an advantageous way to give new life to empty buildings that no longer have prospects within the tertiary market. One solution could be the conversion into residence, aimed at that part of housing demand that today finds it more difficult to meet its needs through the offer of residence in the current market, the social residence.

[1] - In the first months of 2013, the deputy mayor of Milan Ada Lucia De Cesaris made a proposal to experiment with policies that encourage the conversion of offices into residences on the English model initiated in the same year. The issue was initially debated in the print and digital press. One example: article of La Repubblica.it: Carra I., 2013, Case low cost negli uffici vuoti, 2 April 2013.

"MILANO, EDIFICI VUOTI ANCHE IN CENTRO. EPPURE IL CEMENTO NON SI FERMA" Il Fatto quotidiano, 30 luglio 2013.

"CINEMA, POSTE, FABBRICHE E UFFICI, I 204 LUOGHI FANTASMA DELLA CITTA" LaRepubblica, 18 marzo 2014.

"LA MILANO DEGLI EDIFICI ABBANDONATI: QUATTROCENTO AREE A RISCHIO SICUREZZA" LaRepubblica, 16 febbraio 2016.

"MILANO, GLI ATTIVISTI DI "ALDO DICE 26X1" OCCUPANO LA TORRE LIGRESTI" LaRepubblica, 5 settembre 2018.

[image 78] Opposite page: Complex of towers of Viale Giulio Richard.

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