IULM6 - University Institute for Modern Languages
IULM (University Institute for Modern Languages) enlargement:
TOWER: creation of the digital library and the archives; the laboratories and the classrooms
NORTH BUILDING: library;
SOUTH BUILDING: halls, laboratories and offices, auditorium (600 seats)
A Suburb that slowly became Town Centre.
A Suburb of Milan constructed according to the criteria of the post-war city:
building plot, buildings situated in the middle of the plot, according to building
regulations and their volumetric acrobatics.
Urban planning that is violent or blind, Deaf. Never dumb unfortunately.
Deafening silences and universal grey.
The Project: Relativity and Soul; full and empty spaces are designed in the same manner, according to the same principles.
From Relative Space to Homologous Space: a perimeter exists, the fence is as
important as the open spaces and those used for circulation.
The University is a place of research and, therefore, of the Unpredictable.
The place of the Unpredictable is the Space in the Middle, the In-Between.
The routes, the intermediate spaces, the gardens, the terraces, are the places
of perception, of sensory richness, of encounters, of intellectual and loving
ambushes.
Volumetric composition is, in planning, elementary and simple. Almost trivial.
Developing as space, it becomes rich and complex specifically in its relationship with the intermediate spaces.
A tower with a heart made of bricks (the digital library, the functional and symbolic centre for research at IULM) is covered by a continuous ramp, an edgy but unique promenade.
Nostalgia for heroic James Stirling and Wright’s Johnson Wax.
At the centre of trapped full and empty spaces, the great hall with 600 seats,
covered with green tiles, represents disorientation, surprise.
The answer for us, always fi ghting “against the universal grey”.
It is the traffi c light of Luigi Ghirri in Modena.
It is the traffi c light of Bruno Munari in the “Fog of Milan”.
Today not much fog remains.
There is only nostalgia for it: the nostalgia of those who discover that when
the fog vanished, it was the city that was grey.
