CritIt: Conservation/Innovation in Milan's Cityscape

Cino Zucchi, the curator of the Italian pavilion at the architecture Biennale of Venice, guided an exhibition that demonstrates the developing and safeguarding constructions that have been built in Milan in the past 100 years. The unique turning point of the city's aesthetic is directly linked to the bombing of Milan during the second world war. The architecture is exhibited as a reflection of the public life and simultaneously a balance between architecture, history and culture. The continuous metamorphoses not only looks to the context of the past, but also that of the developing present and future related to both the needs of the inhabitants and those of the environment. La Ca' Grande , Palazzo Buonarroti- Carpaccio-Giotto, and Casa Rustici are some of the photographed projects at the pavilion that look to the structures of the present that are built with the intentions of either renovation or innovation. The exhibition also show cases a number of projects under the title A Contemporary Landscape that demonstrate architectural intentions that pay close intention to the environmental setting outside of the general cityscape of central Milan.

La Ca' Grande

The images demonstrate the transformation of a Renaissance building, the former Ospedale Maggiore, into a contemporary structure that fits the modern needs of Milan, expanding the University of Milan. After the bombings of the city during WWII, the Ospedale was one of the important buildings that faced major damages, practically destroyed. The innovative metamorphoses is both creatively conservative and innovative. In contrast to constructing an entirely new structure, the former grand hospital of Milan was made over into a new character, from a 'machine for healing' the body to a 'machine for healing' the mind. The project demonstrates the city's awareness of it's rich cultural history that is an integrated and fundamental aspect of the city's character.

Ca' Grande: The Original

The original building was commissioned by Francesco Sforza who hired the Tuscan architect Antonio Filarete, a significant political and cultural event, in the early 1450s. Filarete constructed one of the first Renaissance buildings in Milan and provided the city with its largest hospital.

Rationalization: Classical and Contemporary Aesthetics

In the 1930s Milan exhibited two contrasting personalities that simultaneously represented the characteristics of the city residents and met the needs of the developing city. On the one hand, there are structures that reinforced the historical nature of the city through the construction of buildings that revived classical structures reminiscent of the Italian Renaissance. On the other hand, structures of another aesthetic also shaped the city's facades, symbols of Milan's contemporary needs, the language of a new era.

Piero Portaluppi's Palazzo Buonarroti- Carpaccio-Giotto (1926-1930) u-shaped luxury residential building in the heart of Milan is representative of the urban character through the revival of the city's classical identity. However, unlike its precedents, the construction modifies the standard through the addition of stores on the ground level. The division of spaces creates a semi-self serving system where the lower levels provide, at least in theory, to the upper levels.

Giuseppe Terragni's Casa Rustici (1933-36) presents the contrary Portaluppi project by articulating the 1930s modernism vocabulary, transforming the cityscape of Milan and contributing the city's identity of progress. While the main portico in the renovated version unifies the complex, the novel structure uses the exterior framework to bring together the elements of the facade; both techniques that express the ideologies that formed them in the first place.

Post WWII Reconstruction

The double articulation of Milan's structure is demonstrated in the images of the buildings that took the place of those destroyed during the second world war. New forms emerged from the rubble which gave another sort of rebirth, meeting the new demands of the residents who required structures with service that responded to their needs. The innovation of the new aesthetic coincided with those that restored the old, at least in response to the selected and exhibited pictures.

Intentionally Awkward Details

New urban developments in Milan show how the residents themselves change the character of the facades of buildings in an almost natural spring of inspiration.

New Forms that Flow with Nature: A Contemporary Landscape

After WWII concerns with connecting the city's heritage, history and appearance has transformed into an evaluation of how structures interact with the environment. This is accomplished through materials, forms, patterns, dimensions and locations. The images demonstrate a collage, a mesh, between what appears to have been there in the past and the forms that are unified to them. The chosen and displayed images of such intentional structures appear to take into account the setting to which they belong to; testifying to the twenty-first century architectural language of Milan. The importance of coexisting with the classical past is now transformed into an awareness of the context beyond the past but by bringing the background, the environment, into the foreground, and becoming a fundamental element of the aesthetic vocabulary.