NowMilan

Architecture

Architecture in Milan

Milan hides its architecture behind street walls and courtyards, so the city gives up very little on a first pass. Most of what it has built since 2000 sits on the rail yards north of the centre.

• Torre PwC

  ·

  Completed 2020

  Daniel Libeskind

  The third tower at CityLife, on the old trade fair grounds. Daniel Libeskind curved the shaft along its full height so the plan rotates as it rises, with the glass following part of a sphere. It faces the straight tower by Arata Isozaki and the twisted one by Zaha Hadid across a shared park. Three offices were given one site and told to differ, and the differences are the plan.

• Bocconi Urban Campus

  ·

  Completed 2019

  SANAA

  A university campus on the site of a former dairy south of the centre. SANAA laid out curved low blocks that never close a courtyard, wrapped in a perforated aluminium skin that reads as a veil rather than a wall. A sports hall and pool sit below the lawn, so the ground stays open across the whole site. It inserts a campus into a dense block without walling the block off.

• Fondazione Prada

  ·

  Completed 2015

  Rem Koolhaas

  An art complex in a former distillery south of the centre. Rem Koolhaas kept seven existing buildings and added three, then covered one of the old volumes entirely in gold leaf so the treated and the ordinary stand side by side. A tower of stacked galleries, each a different height and section, was added later on the same yard. The friction between preservation and new work is the subject, and it is left unresolved on purpose.

• Armani Silos

  ·

  Completed 2015

  Tadao Ando

  An exhibition building for the Armani archive, converted from a grain store. Tadao Ando kept the concrete frame and stripped the interior to four plain floors around a central void. Openings are cut sparingly, so light is controlled rather than admitted. The building holds clothes the way his museums hold art, by removing everything that would compete with them.

• Duomo di Milano

  ·

  Founded 1386

  Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo

  The cathedral at the centre of the city, begun in the fourteenth century and finished in the twentieth. The work is Gothic in a country that had largely refused Gothic, built in Candoglia marble carried down a canal cut for the purpose. Buttresses, pinnacles and statuary accumulated across five centuries, so the elevations record every workshop that touched them. The plan never changed, which is why a building of that many hands still reads as one.