AGREST AND GANDELSONS - URBAN PROJECT "PORTA VITTORIA" MILAN / ITALY, 1986
Cargo
"Passante railroad. The project addresses urban fabric, defining the area that is based on the strict cardinal-point grid of the 1912 Pavia Masera plan. The plan develops a double reading of the area. On one hand it extends and transforms the grid. On the other hand the concentric structure of the historic center of Porta Vittoria is marked with buildings throughout the project. The project proposes an answer to the central problem of modern urbanism—the dialectics between building, object, and fabric. Porta Vittoria is a laboratory where new public buildings and spaces are created, marking an edge between the old and the new city, between the early twentieth-century buildings and the late twentieth-century project. Every building is subject to the dialectic between building and fabric; nothing in the project is entirely building or fabric. The fabric-like constructions have, in different degrees, building roles. The slabs and the monumental building have precise urban roles as street walls, park walls, and gates. The project overlaps a series of slab buildings with commercial and public functions against a ‘background’ of different residential fabrics that either suture the void left by the elimination of the railroad yards or are grafted into it. Public spaces permeate the project as the fabric unfolds from an ideal courtyard type to a double displaced grid of streets and buildings."
The architects classify the building structure as: 1_THE SLAB BUILDINGS, and 2_THE URBAN FABRIC
1_ The Slab Buildings:
A parabolic bowed building defines the eastern wall of the Largo Marinai d’Italia Park. A slab building running in the direction east-southeast of the park wall defines a commercial street at the scale of the new contiguous residential neighborhood. Two slab buildings running east-west define a new boulevard, viale Porta Vittoria, from the Largo Marinai d'Italia to the new train station and bus terminals. The major commercial functions and public buildings are located on this Viale. A slab separates the southern new residential area from the new proposed park east of this area.
2_The Urban Fabric:
Three different fabrics are based on a grid derived from the existing Pavia Masera grid: Idealized courtyard buildings, extrusions of the regular gridded plan, represent a transformation of the existent residential building type (north of the Porta Vittoria Mall); a grid that combines slabs and a street-wall structure that preserves the reading of the slab represent a transformation of the housing located south of via Monte Ortigara; the new residential area grafted on the zone limited by viale Molise to the east, the new viale Porta Vittoria to the north, and via Cesare Lombroso to the south is an invention symbolic of the project. The overlapping of two displaced grids—one, the buildings; the other, the streets—produces a new housing type, which can be seen both as fabric and building object.
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