MILAN - GINO VALLE PLAZA
Valle Architetti Associati
Topoteck 1
Milan, a city with two souls. The business city, frenetic - focused on work - stuck in its glass and steel buildings and on the other side the dynamic and social one that animates its common places. Places that the city, however, rarely makes available to its inhabitants. Over the time, Milan didn’t create many successful square - main meeting place, strongly characterized in Italian culture - and when it did, it happened that they didn’t play the aggregative role for which they were designed .
This happened in the recently built Gino Valle plaza, the largest of the city. This square is part of a larger master plan - designed by Gino Valle himself - which aim is to recovery a district of Milan - Portello - rich in history and importance for the city. The square stands as the new term of the urban and architectural axis made of Milan trade fair’s building, whose large gable stands as one of the edges of the square. This square, however, due to its morphology and its material treatment, has not managed to achieve the goal of being a new aggregate center, becoming just a place which people walk through to reach the urban shopping center and the park, especially those who work in the buildings that make up its edges. The result is that the biggest square of the city is often empty and not characterized by any particular use; This place (or perhaps using Auge’s definition, “this non-place”) remind us the words of Nicolás Gómez: "to challenge God, man swells his own void". A challenge - not towards God, but towards citizenship - that Milan seems to have lost
Milan, 2016
