IDENTITY
Axis of Continuity - Concept
Axis of Fragmentation - Concept
To act in a metropolitan city, as can be seen Milan with his own hinterland, which through the ages has always played a major role and that it was also the subject of radical changes in the political, economic, administrative and social field which inevitably impacted on the urban sphere, needs a level of investigation and reflection on the urban scale before architectural one, especially if the project represents a key point in the urban mesh. The plot is located along the ancient Spanish Walls, whose construction began immediately after the medieval period, and was therefore by a historical point of view an area strongly marked as a threshold, an urban entrance to the city. Nowadays fully divested in favor of the realization of a first ring road, is embedded in the radial tissue of Milan as a second line of demarcation between the first ring of walls and the road bypass.Comparing a reconstruction of the original city wall with what we consider the trace (well recognized) that this has left within the urban mesh of Milan, it is clear as it has always played a dual role,a fence from the inside to which the development is done with patterns typical of the old town and, from the outside firstly as a threshold and then as a cornerstone of modern urban developement. The intent to search for a new genius loci arises from the behavior of the first round of the walls. As we can see before the total demolition, these, together with a few main roads, have regulated urban development, providing with rhythms and measures the mesh, while after the demolition this function has failed according to a shift of the main axes in behalf first of axes infrastructure (roads, rail, subway) and recently of the axes of services. Obvious fact is the tendency to post-modern patterns of development, acting within the dense and layered tissue, creating gaps in which place these services to create new polarities on which set a new urban mesh, that however often characterize themselves as empty and self-referred, massified, globalized and gentrificated. These new polarities also relates to a centrifugal model of the city, which aims at a sprawled urbanism, in contrast with the centripetal model of the historic city. The project area is now like “no man's land” between two strong axialities, a historical one that links Cimitero Monumentale to the historical center and the cathedral through Porta Tenaglia and the other one that intercepts the Porta Nuova area tracing out axis that unites many of the interventions for EXPO2015 (City Life, Portello, Cascina Merlata,Expo Area ..) in NW direction; hence the aim of redefining a new border and an identity now lost. "Today , the attributes that made threshold intermediary and passage have been removed, and so threshold is a distinctive motive between interior and exterior, between confined regions and broad extensions, between closed and open places. Here it returns as a crest of form, and also line of force, a mark of condensations and a consolidated ‘nervous system’ which render it a ‘place of remarkable places’. In the conplex dwelling, threshold opposes the crossing of undifferentiated space, which is spread out and undecipherable, interposing surroundings and accumulations which can be recognised on a scale of characteristic and intersecting relations. If the ancient accepted meaning is reversed, then the very dividing elements will become connective so as to reinforce the sustaining frameworks of a larger transformation. An analogy is postulated between ‘threshold’ an ‘outline’, both of which are borderline states of the form that demarcates varied fields, critical situations of heterogeneous regions,where the condensations ossifying the dwelling hold out against the disintegration of the dwellings restoring a matrix to these. The modern avant-garde antagonist of the exhaustive urban grids - indicates this phenomenon when models of urban condensation are proposed: the tectonic threshold becomes a local specification of entire urban systems and it is opened up to the principle of ‘sequence’. This sequence is not a succession of multiple doorways, but rather a four-dimensional relation of the settlement fragments in the contemporality of space-time. The sequential redefining of threshold draws out the fifth dimension, the memory dimension, which today is the critical line resistance against ‘media’ superimposition and the resulting ‘cultural’ deletions."(S.Crotti) Have been identified two main design axis with profoundly different features; an axis of penetration in SE direction, the axis of continuity, which opens a rhythmic succession of orderly open spaces, and an axis of flowing EW, axis of the fragmentation, that following the traces of the ancient Spanish walls, it inherits their disruption.
Spanish Walls
01_threshold
02_measure
03_rhytm
04_infrastructure
05_web of services
06_development (?)
Traces
Centripetal City
Centrifugal City
cimitero monumentale stazione centrale
porta nuova \ garibaldi porta volta porta nuova piazza della repubblica
arena civica
pinacoteca di brera castello sforzesco foro bonaparte teatro alla scala
galleria v.emanuele II piazza duomo
Project Axes
Paths Francesco Ronchi - 736540