Year: 2005/2008
Client: Milan Polytechnic
Teknoarch services: Preliminary, final and executive designs, on-site assistance
Location: Milan
Subcontractor: Euromilano, C.E.S.I.
Surface area: 3,100 mq
Contract value: REPORT

The new library project is part of a larger recovery plan involving the area of the former Broggi - Isar - Cavanna industrial zone, in the heart of the Bovisa area. The reconversion of this area will provide a critical contribution to the urban upgrading of the entire Bovisa neighborhood; the scope of the operation becomes even more evident if one considers the urban renewal program for this part of the city as a whole: the intention is to provide residents and other users with a functional, high quality area whose new identity is linked to innovation and excellence, recalling the area's manufacturing reputation in the past. Using the symbolic instruments of architecture, an attempt has been made to symbolically address an issue profoundly connected with the institution: knowledge, interpreted in an anti-monumental key. The guidelines of the project are thus those of knowledge as a dialectic, an exchange of sometimes contrasting views, often apparently ambiguous or contradictory. The large façade on the city street announces the theme. It is obsessively subdivided into a series of squares of serigraphed glass and bas-reliefs on the cement walls. Each of these fields reflects, as if in a surreal mirror, the image of the gas meter, taken from a photograph of the factory before it was demolished. The mirror of the past brings up the subject of memory: the first duty of a library is, in fact, to act as a guardian of our memories. The façade preserved the memory of what could be seen before the demolition of the former Bovisa complex permitted it to be built: destruction was a necessary condition for its creation. The façade can also be seen as a wall made of large stone slabs, which contradicts itself as it raises up off the ground, for its tectonics would impose a position solidly anchored to the earth. The symbolic boundary and closure wall lifts up, allowing entry and transforming itself into a leaf. The support that reveals knowledge: the leaf is the same element that closes off and separates the wall. The entire building is composed of a package of walls/leaves (see the side views). Even the labyrinthine portico is made of fragments of leaves, with the aim of disorienting all who would enter it. This path leads to the library and the garden. The building and the garden engage in an additional dialectic. The first, the edifice, is constructed with a clear and articulated assembly, while the second is deconstructed, it falls to pieces, following the opposite sequence. Nature and Culture proceed by opposite means, even when pursuing the same ends.