By no means the most conventional of tourist locations nor the most glamorous, but nevertheless, a vast, monolithic but equally beautiful housing estate by Aldo Rossi proved to be the highlight of a recent trip of mine to Milan. In the city centre, I had already gazed up to the medieval fortress of the Torre Velasca, a 26-storey tower representing the Neoliberty principles Rossi was also associated with, I had sampled the ornamental but surprisingly tasteful Duomo, and had visited Gio Ponti’s Torre Branca towering over the nearby Milan Triennale. All this was completely blown out of the window when I came to Rossi’s Gallaratese housing, a short underground trip from the city centre of Milan. Here there was light! And shadow! Here there were playful architectural delights that both astonished and amused me. How could a dense, heavy and monumental building feel so light and airy, so open and clean, despite being a jam-packed affordable housing estate? This could only happen in Milan, sunny Milan, never in a dark, gritty housing metropolis in cold Blighty.
I first came across the Gallaratese housing when I was writing my Masters Architectural History dissertation on James Stirling’s Southgate Estate in Liverpool. This had a very different story, although sharing common principles and aesthetics. Southgate was built from 1967-1978 in two phases, the first with concrete and Brutalist with round ‘washing-machine windows’, the second with High-Tech GRP panels earning the estate the nickname ‘Legoland’. However the estate became unpopular and unmanageable, with the Architects’ Journal deeming it ‘Britain’s Pruitt Igoe’, a label which predicted its fate of demolition little more than a decade after completion. Rossi’s Gallaratese is similarly monumental and almost classical in form to Stirling’s first phase at Southgate. It is particularly the scale of the undomestic for the domestic which brings to mind similar visions for both projects, as Peter St John describes, “a sort of palace occupied by the people”.
Here is the interesting article on Building Design, where Peter St John describes how Rossi’s Gallaratese housing showed him that modern architecture could incorporate classical themes.
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