An industrial, half abandoned area in Milan’s darkest periphery is asking for an urban redevelopment: 50’000 square meters of social housing and facilities to fill what is currently seen as an urban void. Wood Sprawl undertakes the study of the peripheries along with their flaws and the monsters they left behind from the bygone 50s, the 60s and the 70s along with the lack of any care, design or any social integration. The superposition of a rational grid meant to solve all problems and flatten any diversity and challenging peculiarity. It aims to change the paradigm in suburban developments, no longer ex-novo constructions and massive buildings but rather precise surgical interventions to bring new life to the abandoned current structures. The void now becomes an urban forest, not a garden, not a park but a forest. A forest where the unexpected is welcome, where the rigid grid of the cities expansion has no value, where rational patterns stop at the borders and architecture is brought back to its primordial phase, in complete harmony with nature. A wooded area with a succession of clearings, dense patches, lakes and towers hosts small chapels, high slim bridges, floating swimming pools and metaphysical platforms. The square meters the city requires are distributed around the area: empty warehouses, deposits, occupied houses and roofless cascinas are brought back to life through rigorous study and precise interventions on the existing. All connected to the central forest through promenades that extend above the rooftops, above the yards and above the treetops. The public functions the city needs, closer to the center of the forest; the more private functions, towards the outer extremities of the footbridges. The urban scale of the periphery now becomes the first design factor for what was intended to be a series of traditional buildings
