Gentle Monuments

Increasingly challenged by atomized, stereotyped, and private social relations, our cities still need public buildings. The architecture of public buildings, ultimately their form, supports collective life, represents the aspirations of a community, and provides firm points of reference for its memory. Today, a careful approach to the collective form should be coherently combined with radical ecological aspirations, outside of any environmentalist rhetoric.

Taking as our site a derelict area of Milan, the Studio project will be concerned with defining a new public building committed to a contemporary, anti-ideological, and frugal form of monumentality. Collective form will be consistently explored and combined with radical climate responsiveness and ecological aspirations, informed by our interactions with climate scientists and sustainability experts.

The building will combine spaces for a neighborhood library with an additional civic function in a proportionally symmetrical way; this dual agenda will reinvent the idea of the library, shifting the focus from a functionalistic attitude to the public essence of the space.

A catalogue of 24 references selected from Milanese precedents will form a stable background for our research. The examples will be related to possible forms of monumentality belonging to three distinct spheres: the classical, the rural, the industrial. Giving rise to unanticipated transfers and ambiguous combinations, this constellation of precedents will help us to derive new figures for the investigation of a contemporary public form.

Both the city and the library are forms of accumulation, physical as well as immaterial: their most extraordinary qualities are the result of a continuous overlapping of different voices, cultural histories, and built matter. The architecture of the public building will be defined through this accumulative condition, directly confronting issues of transformation and assemblage rather than exclusive autonomy.

The studio will take us to Milan, an anti-monumental city par excellence, where we will engage with its distinctive urban culture, its antique churches, its never-finished monuments, and its modern ruins. Then we will leave the excess of the city for the southern landscape of Reggio Emilia and Modena, driving into the open fields of Luigi Ghirri’s photographs and discovering there a different kind of monumentality related to the ordinary, finding some new references for our urban collective form.