Civic Center

CIVIC CENTER
2014
Milan, Italy

GFA 1250 m², 1,5 millions Euro, 4 storeys
Design: Mattia Malavenda
Client: Comune di Milano

The Centro Civico Isola-Garibaldi project is a 2014 International Architecture Competition commissioned by the Municipality of Milan.

Located near Milano downtown, at the edge of a central public park, the civic center must host recreational, educational and cultural/artistic activities for the neighborhood’s residents.

The goal is to improve the opportunity of participation, production, condivision of social, cultural and artistic expressions among citizen and visitors.

The main idea is to design is a modern building tha serve as a hub for the community if the neighborhood Isola-Garibaldi and in the same time as a fulcrum between the Garibaldi park and the Isola urban area.

The concept of fulcrum as a point of support about which a lever turns or a thing that plays a central or essential role in an activity, event or situation.

In the project this idea is highlighted in the design of the plans, in which a round, open and landscaped area, embraced by the wings of the building, seems like a leverage point of attraction, in this case for the community.

At architectural level the open circular area right in front of the entrance of the building is covered by the last floor of the building, that result the widest floor in term of surface.

This last floor is basically cantilevered of 11,5 metres above the central outdoor area and it's beared by a two steel reticular structure erected at the sides of the building and cladded with semi-opaque glass, so that the structure can be slightly visible during the day from the exterior.

Another design choice is to locate the activities that don't need to be sun-lighted and acoustically insulated (concert/ theatre, multimedia and recording room) at the forth and last floor, to allow the rest of the building at the lower floors to be completely glazed and transparent, just screened with vertical wooden sun-breaks.

While above the last floor looks heavy and massive even if pretty crystalline, below the building is almost dematerialized and ephemeral.

This “switch of the opposite” is a metaphor of the actual, contemporary society and is formally expressed in this architectural concept.

The Isola-Garibaldi civic center competition project classified within the first 10 project having passed the first of two judgement stages.

In the creative and artistic experience of MMA this represent a sort of manifesto of its poetic striving for a weightless, complex and significant architecture.