Itineraries Through Milan's Architecture
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ORDINE DEGLI ARCHITETTI, FONDAZIONE DELL’ORDINE DEGLI ARCHITETTI, PIANIFICATORI, PAESAGGISTI E CONSERVATORI PIANIFICATORI, PAESAGGISTI E CONSERVATORI DELLA PROVINCIA DI MILANO DELLA PROVINCIA DI MILANO /types form, function, meaning in architecture High-rise Milan Fulvio Irace, Federico Ferrari Itineraries through Milan’s architecture Modern architecture as a description of the city “Itineraries through Milan’s Architecture: Modern Architecture as Description of a City” is a project by The Order of Architects of the Province of Milan, organized by its Foundation Scientific Coordinator: Maurizio Carones Managing Director: Paolo Brambilla Editorial Staff: Alessandro Sartori, Stefano Suriano General Manager: Giulia Pellegrino Press Office Ferdinando Crespi “High-rise Milan” Federico Ferrari, Fulvio Irace edited by: Alessandro Sartori, Stefano Suriano, Barbara Palazzi back cover: Studio BBPR, Velasca Tower, longitudinal section, 1951-1958 © BBPR Archive For copyrights regarding any unidentified iconographic materials, please contact the Foundation of the Order of the Architects, Planners, Landscape Architects and Conservators of the Province of Milan www.ordinearchitetti.mi.it www.fondazione.ordinearchitetti.mi.it High-rise Milan Federico Ferrari The high-rise building has always represented one of the themes par excellence of the modernity. The suggestion exercised by the American examples has been one of the strong suits of the Modern Movement, at least since the celebrated journey of Le Corbusier in the United States. Mesmerised by the dream of the vertical metropolis that would free man from the suffocating density of the traditional city, the Swiss architect pushed humanity to embrace without hesitation the skyscraper typology. A symbolic representation of a “drive toward the sky,” as the Promethean effort to annul the restrains of the gravity force, “the skyscraper can be considered as the model of the building magnificence typical of the homo faber of the twentieth century”(1). The Italian culture, and certainly Milan as its most advanced standpoint – since the twenties the city is the crucible of the most updated architectural works of the country – has often shown a certain reluctance, if not a clear aversion, to this vertical contemporaneity. With the exception of the futuristic rhetoric of Sant’Elia, as a testimony of the ambiguity that has continuously tried to conciliate the typical disrupting characteristics of the skyscraper, in its classical meaning, with the recovering of a general relationship with a quite inescapable tradition, there is also a terminological question: The cases of the Milanese “high- rise buildings” here presented, are more often referred to as “towers”, rather than skyscrapers. We will also examine as this semantic choice is not so much due to the size of the building, as it is to the formal characteristics that, case by case, emphasize continuity or break-up factors. Milan, as the economic capital of the country, has also been characterised with this sort of fear, as witnessed by the public debate on the opportunity of studding the city with high-rise buildings. In fact, a law of the Fascist period imposed the Madonnina as the tallest point among the urban buildings. The Torre Littoria – later known as the Torre Branca – built by Gio Ponti inside Parco Sempione, on occasion of the V HIGH-RISE MILAN Triennale (1933), had to limit its height to 108 metres, half metre lower than the cathedral spire. In 1954, the Torre Breda by Luigi Mattioni, 116 metres height, contravened for the first time this ban by setting a new record. Some years later, the Pirelli building set a new record again, with its 127.10 metres height, but only with the promise that a reproduction of the Madonnina would have been accommodated at its top. The first Milanese “skyscraper” in chronological order is, officially speaking, the Snia-Viscosa building in Piazza San Babila, designed in 1935-37 by Alessandro Rimini. It holds this primacy despite the Casa-Torre Rasini (1933-34) had been actually built two years earlier. While the Casa-Torre Rasini is a residential building, Rimini’s building embodies the true essence of the overseas archetypes of skyscraper, not as much for its architectural feature, as for its location and multi- purpose scope. It truly deserves the epithet of “skyscraper” for its self-promotional character, being a self-referential and advertising element, able to express the client’s values: economic power, scientific- technological knowledge and focus to years to come. THE SNIA-VISCOSA COMPLEX (1935-1937) BY A. RIMINI (PHOTO BY ALESSANDRO SARTORI) HIGH-RISE MILAN However, from the expressive point of view, the skyscraper shows no will of wriggling out from the classical gravitas. It is a solid volume, characterised by a disciplined, modernist language still influenced by the stylistic elements of the twentieth century, combined with a symmetry, whose syntax cannot be referred to any Avant-garde principles. Defined as “skyscraper” by the contemporary critics, yet it has been praised for its “closed-mass, towered shape […], with no adds nor confused mass of utilitarian elements”(2). This is how the overseas archetype, despite maintaining its denomination, is immediately brought back to the tradition, also denying the distinctive trait of the “International Style” skyscraper, defined since Walter Gropius designed the Chicago Tribune building, and characterised it with the modularity of the typical floor. This trait and its iteration, contrasting with the traditional and still used tripartition, although taken over its limit by the works of the Chicago School, symbolized the ambition of an infinite progression upwards. In fact, the denial of the closed shape, formally characterised by the tight dialectics between the structural THE TORRE RASINI BY G. PONTI AND E. LANCIA (PHOTO BY LUCA D’ALESSIO) HIGH-RISE MILAN grid and the dissolution of the wall into curtain-walls, was one of the topos of modernity. Investigating the different expressive potential of the framework and the wall turned into a diaphragm, the Lombard tradition shows since the thirties a pronounced ambiguity. In the large, according to the Italian culture, the exposition of the structure, made possible by the use of reinforced concrete, is nuanced – see the exemplary case of the Casa del Fascio designed by Giuseppe Terragni in Como – with manifest classical echoes, aimed at researching a metaphysic expressivity that has little resemblance with the transalpine machinist rhetoric. Gio Ponti, for instance, reinterprets in a personal way the transparent wall, but he has no intention whatsoever of denying the intimacy of the residence, subverting the inside/outside notions. The “Italian-style house” although embracing without hesitation the potential offered by the industrialisation, maintains its “domesticity” feature: “Today there is no such thing as a façade, the exterior of the house forms an organic whole with the building. And this organic construction is entirely committed to make the house comfortable and enjoyable, by means of verandas, balconies and large windows. These elements […] are the house itself and the loveliest rooms face out to these openings to the air and the sun […]” (3). If we consider the first building, in chronological order, treated in this essay, the Casa-torre Rasini at the Bastioni di Porta Venezia (1933-34), the above statement might seem completely inconsistent. If we focus on the basic ambiguity contained in Ponti’s words, however, we can still find, also in the early example of the Porta Venezia building - to some extent peculiar compared to other Pontian works - his research on the “value of plan and the graphic taste of surface” (4) free from any formal dogmatism typical of many European works. Both in the case of the block posed as a bridge-head in Corso Venezia, and in the vertical, tower-shaped building opening on the rear gardens – beyond the doubtful and long debated contributions given respectively by Lancia and Ponti – the texture of materials, being them a smooth marble skin or a textured clinker brickwork, gives substance to a free and informal composition. Ponti’s original approach intercepts some suggestions from rationalism – the themes of lightness and design, among others – but he articulates them in an original way, playing with the basic ambiguity of the “clad materials exposed more as a structure of the image, rather than as a decoration” (5). In short, it is a different kind of modernity that during the post-war period will find its most accomplished example in the endeavour of the Pirelli skyscraper. HIGH-RISE MILAN At a large, the theme of the “rising architecture” can be interpreted as a metaphor of the modernity, as a continuous and laborious research for its own roots, while being aware of an historical continuity that will gradually take on different declinations. The Milanese culture indeed “kept away from the clear-cut divide between past and present that, among the European artists and architects, gave substance to unprecedented expressive forms and housing layouts completely different from the pre-existing urban context”(6). After the pre-war period attempts - often still characterised by certain monumentality, but containing in nuce a distinctive sensitiveness that will be evident after the fall of the Fascist regime - in the fifties we finally find the expression of the more specifically “meditative” character of this reinterpretation of modernity. Middle class and industry almost