Milan 1945, the Reconstruction: Modernity, Tradition, Continuity

After the Second World War, in 1945, Milan is largely destroyed. Monuments and houses, parks and transportation systems: the whole city and its center have been heavily damaged. The age of reconstruction had to face many different problems that implied important architectural and theoretical questions: the loss of a great number of monuments that represented the identity of the city, the destruction of many historical residential blocks and the large need for housing- coming from the years before the war - that will increase in the following two decades due to industrial development. Facing those problems led to a renewal of architecture and the city. In this period, an important school of architects was developing in Milan – at the time, one of the most vital cities in Italy for its cultural and economic activities - together with a group of intellectuals, philosophers, poets and artists. The head of this group of architects working in both Milan and Venice (Albini, Gardella, Figini e Pollini, Bottoni) was Ernesto Rogers, the director of Casabella Continuità, the most leading architectural magazine at the time. To be truly modern he claimed it was necessary to look at history and to study the construction principles of historical cities: not to imitate forms but to not lose their own identity. The idea of continuity built a bridge between tradition and modernity. But what did continuity mean in architecture and which direction did this research take? One of the most outstanding and discussed results of these ideas was the Velasca Tower, the first modern high-rise building in reinforced concrete built in the historical core of the city: a new typology realized with modern materials, with shapes that seemed to refer to the Milan’s medieval history. The architectural team was BBPR (Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti, Rogers) together with a well-known engineer, Arturo Danusso. Too modern but too old: for this reason the English critic Reyner Banham accused the Italian architects of retreating from modern architecture. This debate marked a change in Italian architecture. Few relevant monuments were rebuilt or restored as they were before the war - the Teatro alla Scala and some partially destroyed churches – and other public buildings were completed in different forms, like the Renaissance-era Ospedale Maggiore by Filarete. But the best built-projects attempted to overcome both the philological reconstruction and the last experiences of the International Style, also facing the problems of the construction principles of the city and of the role of green spaces as collective urban places. The research moving toward a modern architecture that was closely related to the tradition was especially applied to the reconstruction of the residential blocks of the city center – projects by Bottoni, Asnago e Vender, Moretti – and to the construction of the new settlements – QT8, Harar and Feltre among the most interesting ones. In the meantime, scientific studies on the city, its structure and its architecture took root: the research on the relationships between typology and morphology originated from this interest to better understand historical cities in order that each one’s history may continue.