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 /themes themed tours through the city Milan and the Unification of Italy Paolo Galuzzi Piergiorgio Vitillo Itineraries through Milan’s architecture Modern architecture as a description of the city “Itineraries through Milan’s architecture: Modern architecture as a description of a city” is a project by the Order of Architects, Planners, Landscape Architects and Conservators, edited by its Foundation. Scientific Coordinator: Maurizio Carones Executive Director: Paolo Brambilla Editorial Staff: Alessandro Sartori, Stefano Suriano General Manager: Giulia Pellegrino Press Office: Ferdinando Crespi “Milan and the Unification of Italy” Paolo Galuzzi, Piergiorgio Vitillo Edited by: Alessandro Sartori, Stefano Suriano, Barbara Palazzi Images courtesy of: Biblioteca Comunale di Foligno, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense Translation: Mike Ryan On the back cover: Milan skyline from the Cathedral’s roof, photo by Stefano Suriano, 2011 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 Milan and the Unification of Italy Paolo Galuzzi and Piergiorgio Vitillo (1) Milan, a modern city During the Kingdom of Italy and up until the outbreak of World War II (1861-1914), Milan established its role as a modern city. Naturally, this growth process affected both the city and industry, but it also involved politics, culture and the arts. In fact, industrialisation became increasingly important during the tenure of Giovanni Giolitti (1901-1914), who brought undisputed leadership to the city in economic and financial matters as witnessed by the International Exhibition of 1906 (2). During the time that unification of the Italian State was being consolidated, Milan had yet to attain the momentum and the culture necessary to become the country’s economic capital on par with other European cities. Its ruling class, still split between the promise of an industrial future and a more typically Milanese sense of security in land and property, initially invested the majority of its capital in exploiting the city itself and its profitable real estate assets, underestimating the economic and business impact that unification would provide, both by opening up a national market and by creating relationships with the rest of Western Europe (3). The grandeur of some of the projects to reform the City Centre, therefore, will come up against initial budgetary constraints posed by a cautious and conservative middle class that at the time was not very modern. The planning projects that were carried out, at least in the first two decades after unification, provide substantial evidence of the provincialism of the Milanese bourgeoisie, which had forgotten the lessons of Carlo Cattaneo and his European vision. This itinerary touches on the places and artifacts of the historic MILAN AND THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY city – some of them bona fide urban palimpsests – that provided fertile ground for ideas and projects that accompanied the bourgeois modernisation of the city. Addressed individually in the specific analyses, particular attention has been given to modern-day events that provide the opportunity to view those ideas in a wider perspective. The Beruto Plan (1884-1889) The city grew and changed under the guidance of the first masterplan: the city centre, then enclosed within the Spanish walls (1549-1560), became the place that represented the ideals and interests of the emerging Milanese bourgeoisie. Despite the lukewarm, if not downright negative, judgment by Aldo Rossi, who defined the plan as characterised by “mediocrity” (especially when compared to his preferred Napoleonic plan of 1807), the plan by Cesare Beruto (architect and chief engineer of the city) offered a moderately international vision in terms of its content, choices and techniques used (a “cautious and modest Plan” (4)). Intended to regulate urban development, the plan structured the city’s growth outside of the Spanish walls, which themselves were to be almost completely demolished, with the exception of the section between Porta Nuova and Porta Venezia. Furthermore, it quadrupled the number of major arteries running through the city that connected the historic city with the new outlying districts and called for the transformation of a pedestrian walkway (at the time raised, with ample wooded areas) into an inner ring road: an attenuated version of the ring road in Vienna that designed a linear public city (parks, gardens, services and facilities), which was drastically reduced following final approval of the plan. Gradually demolished until the Second World War, many of the new urban infrastructures were built along the footprint of the wall or in its immediate vicinity between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first railway stations (the Stazione Centrale in Piazza della Repubblica, the funeral train station in Porta Romana and Stazione di Porta Genova), urban facilities (the Cimitero Monumentale, the San Vittore prison), and some modest gardens (5). At the time, Milan had a little over 350 thousand inhabitants; the municipal area measured, even counting the inclusion of the Corpi Santi in 1873, just less than 7,500 hectares (compared to the current 18,000 hectares). This date marks the beginning of significant changes in the city, becoming the MILAN AND THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY second largest city in Unified Italy in terms of demographic size, surpassed only by Naples, but much more populous than Rome. The structure that ordered the urban fabric was represented by the street grid (city blocks initially about 200 metres in the first version of the plan from 1884, were halved to “real estate size” with the approved version of 1889), which consolidated the forma urbis inherited from history, comprising radial roadways converging towards the city centre and concentric ring roads. The most obvious content of the Plan is the expansion of the city, a donut between the Spanish walls and the new outer ring road (now the “viale delle Regioni” (Avenue of the Regions), about 20 km long with a 40-metre wide cross section): about 1,900 hectares (more than twice that of the urban footprint at the time, a little over 800 hectares), which could accommodate 500 thousand new residents since the functional diversification that would be introduced in the next Century by the Modern Movement didn’t exist yet. Urban expansion was arranged like a crown around the Spanish walls, for a variable depth (between 600 and 1,500 metres), incorporating the few developed areas outside the walls (6). The public city consisted of streets and squares (about 400 hectares), along with parks, gardens and other public spaces (approximately 250 hectares), a very limited area compared to other masterplans of the era. Consider that the city only had the Giardini Pubblici, established by will of Joseph II of Austria at the end of the eighteenth Century on the areas occupied by two demolished monasteries. With an isotropic growth, but more significantly to the north and west, where two large facilities were planned, the marshalling yard and the new parade ground; narrower to the east and south, where the natural conditions of the soil (aquifer outcropping and abundance of water) had always discouraged development. The main element characterising the plan was the development of a north-west axis that originated at the vast area including the Castle and a large, newly-planned park adjacent to it (Parco Sempione). In comparison to other masterplans of the day, the Beruto Plan called for demolition of limited portions of the historic urban fabric. The most significant measure was the formation of Via Dante, the initial portion of an axis that runs north-west from the city centre passing through the Castle and Park and continuing beyond Arco della Pace with the present day Corso Sempione. The project involved the renovation of Piazza Cordusio – planned as the financial hub of the nineteenth Century city – connecting it with MILAN AND THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY Piazza Duomo, which had already been redesigned in its current form with the addition of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. The axis continued south east of the new Piazza del Duomo with Corso di Porta Romana linked by the construction of Via Mazzini, which required demolishing the Romanesque church, San Giovanni in Conca). Before these interventions, a series of public works had already been completed: the “regularisation” of Via Torino, the construction of Corso Genova and its continuation towards the railway station (Corso Colombo) as well as two other streets, Via Vigevano and Via Mortara, which led to the new railway station of Porta Genova and reorganised the surrounding neighbourhood. Major reform of the City Centre In the thirty years that passed between the unification of the country and the approval of the Beruto Plan, Milan experienced a marked increase in population and a significant spurt in building with new construction and the transformation of the existing urban fabric, which was the object of make-overs, added storeys, substitutions and densification. During the first decades of post-unification, the City was active on several fronts: new streets were