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An international competition to design the redevelopment of the Milan Fiera site brought the winning consortium that included Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Arata Isozaki and Pier Paolo Maggiora working on the project. The 255,000 m2 site will include retail complexes, residential blocks and three office towers.
STUDIO DANIEL LIBESKIND:
Daniel Libeskind won the commission for master planner of the Fiera Milano project site in 2004 which spans 106 acres on the old fairgrounds of the historic city ofMilan in Italy. The scheme of Fiera Milano incorporates residential and office development, retail space and a museum all built around a central park - a much needed lung for the city. Studio Daniel Libeskind will design not only the master plan, but the park, the museum of contemporary art, one of the office towers and the first housing area.
The strategy of the proposal is simple and straightforward. It provides a seamless connectivity into the existing city fabric, creating a new neighborhood around a central park and a new public piazza within a beautiful high-rise skyline.
The proposal is a series of archipelagos, placed within the park, each proposing a variety of different scales. The housing units, ranging from villas to apartment blocks, are carefully sited on the perimeter of the site and at a scale which resonates within the existing context.
The new housing uses the existing plan as a point of departure and creates living typologies that are both sympathetic to the traditional forms yet forward looking. The housing also creates a balance between private courtyards and larger public spaces. The arrangement of the housing parcels maximizes daylight, fresh air and beautiful views. It is clear from this urban scheme that the approach is to provide housing, which is not only flexible within itself, but is also completely different from one parcel to the next. This feature is essential in making this site one which draws upon the richly layered blocks and history of Milan and organically links the housing to the new park."
In order to provide a culturally diverse and exciting mix with the housing, the organization of the scheme carefully places essential cultural buildings and retail amenities on site. An energetic and exciting gateway is provided from the north with the museum building, a space for contemporary arts with exhibition spaces, amenities and an auditorium. Prominent retail stores and public programs provide a compelling magnet to the site. These public programs act as a buffer to the large-scale remaining Fiera buildings to the north while integrating the public park at its center and the housing units to the east, west and southern edges.
Close to the center of the new grand central park are three iconic commercial high rise buildings. This component of the site is deliberately and resolutely concentrated in order to maximize space for a grand park, a grand piazza and the other public and private spaces. The skyscrapers are personally crafted and conceived to provide a sculpted and highly visible skyline on the site. Each building has an individual expression, yet all three are coupled in a cohesive arrangement in order to create the grand public piazza, now called, “Piazz 3 Torri.”
The designs of the skyscrapers go beyond superficial treatments of facades and create a spatial and functional disposition of spaces with extraordinary internal vistas and activities for the users. These iconic skyscrapers have been engineered with state of the art technology and are environmentally sound and sustainable. Underneath the new piazza there are retail and particular public amenities which help to dissolve the boundary between the public and private commercial realm. This will be located in direct connection with the a station of Line 5, the planned expansion to Milan’s subway system.
Text and Photos from SDL. More from their website.
ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS:
Zaha Hadid’s design includes a 190 meter office tower of 43 storeys, totalling 65.000 sqm connected to a 3-storey retail galleria of 25.000 sqm and on a site opposite a housing complex of 6 buildings ranging from 3 to14 stores totaling nearly 45.000 sqm and 300 units.
CONCEPT:
The high-rise as a building typology has traditionally been treated as a static, fixed strategy; the tower is reduced to a technocratic, engineering ‘solution’ governed by specific economic factors. Architects, in this role, have been left with the spire, exterior shell or, perhaps more significantly, the lobby interior. For the Fiera Milano, Zaha Hadid Architects have investigated the urban location of the tower as a portal, or gate into the Fiera along Viale Scarampo and Via Bartolomeo. Derivations of the passagio from the site into this gate gives shape to a certain torsion or vortex, and it is this movement, this dynamism that we are investigating.
MODEL PHOTOGRAPHY:
Fiera di Milano, Model Photography © Zaha Hadid Architects
Fiera di Milano, Model Photography © Zaha Hadid Architects
Source: Zaha Hadid Blog