"Ensemble aus Einzelteilen" in Bauwelt 24/2024

Milan continues to captivate architecture enthusiasts as a focal point of metropolitan architecture – as a design and fashion center, the capital of Lombardy attracts hordes of visitors year after year. The special quality of the modern architecture there is something that is often denied in this country, especially in the convincing examples of the last 100 years. Building relationships with the surroundings (spatial, historical, and material), incorporating urban space into the building, providing a visual feast for pedestrians – Milan's urban architecture of the last century cannot be experienced in a car, but is best experienced on foot. Developing this quality further when it comes to renovating, repurposing, and expanding individual buildings is the challenge facing the city's architects today. Is it possible to resolve the city from even a single project? Is it possible to maintain a public dimension of the project result from a private building and for private use? Is it possible to introduce a gentle urbanity even by solving pragmatic and introverted programmes? These are the questions that contemporary life continues to propose to us, and increasingly so given the neo-liberal drift in the construction of cities, where public spending no longer provides for public buildings that directly express collective characters, but almost only envisages private interventions with exclusively financial ends in mind. The awareness of how the city survives individual destinies seems today the only thought capable of founding an ethic of resistance to the consumption of the changing images that have today projected architecture into the dimension of pure communication. In latin language, the word urbanity is synonymous with education and good manners. Living together working on the building of a city means accepting the limitation of individual power given by customs, ways of life, that dense network of unwritten codes that allows coexistence. Modernism proposed to reduce to zero the inertia of the form, which also starts from pragmatic needs, but then the building lasts and encounters different desires, its partially autonomous character from the programme, its resonances, its sometimes sentimental nature.