Location_Piazza della Scala, Milan
Year_2015
Client_Municipality of Milan – Bank Intesa San Paolo
Service_Ideas competition in single phase
Introduction
The project focuses on two portions of Piazza della Scala:
1. The parterre of the theater, which is slightly widened on Via Manzoni to gain more free space in front of the porch of Piermarini.
2. The road facing the new museum Gallerie d’Italia, which is transformed into a pedestrian area, in continuity with the existing square.
Urban context
Milan is changing: the total amount of tourists passing in are powerfully ascending. The increase of visitors will be conveyed into new paths. It will be necessary to rebalance the flow of crowd that today are concentrated mainly along the axis San Babila / Castello Sforzesco.
New pedestrian areas will complement the existing ones.
The project assume the political instances that characterize the government of the city: great care of pedestrian and bicycle mobility and gradual closing of the historic center to private vehicle.
The general hypothesis of the project is to set up a new pedestrian route that connects the area of Via Montenapoleone, with its vocation for fashion and shopping, to Brera, which is devoted to culture and arts.
Piazza Scala will be the fulcrum of this new pedestrian axis.
The parterre of “Gallerie d’Italia”
The large street facing the museum “Gallerie d’Italia” will be paved with the same stone of the existing square.
Red porphyry cobblestones pavement is reinterpreted through the use of strips of the same material, as if the existing square was ideally stretched till the facade of the museum.
The existing sidewalks in granite is preserved and serve as a model for the new ones.
This will allow that accesses to Museum will be not invested by the construction site.
Within a square mostly empty and colonizable, the project focused on a podium which is both bench and table: The Platfrom.
The Platform – theoretical premises
Milan is changing, perhaps “change” is part of its identity.
The specifity of Milan is not just the beauty of monuments, but the incredible human factor that pervades the city!
The creative ferment of its architects, artists, musicians, designers, chefs is the treasure of Milan.
Milan “capital of design” after driving for a century, the so-called industrial design, should be the guide of a new revolution, the one that are moving upside down the world of services and digital. The design world must reinvent themselve and make Milan the forefront of what might be called “open design” or “co-design”.
In Piazza Scala we imagine an object that represents all this: The Platform.
The Platform – the architectural object
From the formal hybridization between a chair and a table, born The Platform.
The Platform is a piece of street furniture designed for the Milan’s workers society, sometimes extemporizing forms of open-air coworking.
Physically is a large working table with power outlets for charging smartphones and laptops.
The hardware is very simple: LED walls are mounted behind stone slabs perforated in correspondence with each LED.
In this way the stone surfaces acts as a screen programmable by anyone via smartphone’s app or website of the municipality of Milan.
The Platform is a piece of design iridescent and constantly co-designed by the people.
The Platform is expression of the zeitgeist.
