Graduation project at Politecnico di Milano 
Italy
2004

Milan apart is a project experiment at urbane scale on the city of Milan. Is it possible to project a city? Or, better and far from renaissance ideals, is it possible to change an entire city and not only one of its parts? The project works at an unusual scale: it wants to be architecture at an urban scale, the scale of the city, not of the metropolis, not even of the urban fragment. The project begins by writing on the city as in the ancients Japanese maps where architectonic signs come replaced from calligraphic signs: architecture transforms itself in a tale, in the description of an imaginary. Milan apart analyzes the actual changes of the city, understanding the mechanisms, the logic that makes out of spacial transformations gadgets in the Milan machine. A sterile machine, like those painted by Picabia: Milan today it is not in motion and that because of these crazy gadgets that are moving independently in the city. Milan apart proposes to plan transformations that, together, allow a more harmonic movement of the machine. In order to achieve this goal, we have chosen 10+1 architectures in as many sites. The 10+1 architectures are planned in areas with the biggest future potentiality: the goods yards and the areas that we call crystals because of their definite design in the magmatic pattern of the city. The imaginary follows two different ways: in the goods yards we propose the living in between; in the crystals the no houses, in order to avoid the model “esselunga”, the engine that is now turning many parts of the central city into sleeping neighbourhoods. To start the reaction that would allow to these ten architectures to order the movement of the city, we use a catalyst, the eleventh architecture: the new circular subway of Milan, a project that uses the actual railway circle.

Tutors: Prof. Remo Dorigati, Prof Giovanni La Varra

Selected Project for Archiprix 2005

Follow up

> architettura.it/architetture/20041109/

> www.gizmoweb.org/2010/06/milano-a-pezzi-una-circolare-in-citta-by-quinzii-terna/

> www.glistatigenerali.com/architettura-urbanistica_milano/milano-2016-dopo-la-citta-immaginata-da-pisapia-1/

> www.arcipelagomilano.org/archives/44236