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By Bill Page, Class of 2001
Photos by the author unless noted

Recently my wife and I visited Milan, Italy, home of La Scala, high fashion, and, as we discovered, a whole lot of eye-catching architecture.

Here’s La Scala, designed by Giuseppe Piermarini and opened in 1778:

Nearby is the Duomo, the Milan Cathedral, begun in 1386 and completed in 1965. (Yep, almost 600 years). From across the plaza, it’s quite impressive:

And climbing to the rooftop, views are striking:

 

That curvy building in the center background was designed by Daniel LIbeskind and completed in 2014, one of three towers among multiple buildings in the CityLife development project. The others were designed by Zaha Hadid (2018) and Arata Isozaki (2016). We didn’t get good pictures of them, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libeskind_Tower did (full credit below).

And that brings us to the heart of this article.

Touring the city, we got quick glimpses of a number of 21st century skyscrapers. On our last day there, I asked a hotel concierge how we could get to see those buildings close up. He told us to walk just a few blocks from the hotel, and what a thrill that turned out to be! Most of the buildings were clustered very near each other, around Piazza Gae Aulenti, a contemporary mall and plaza (with just the gelato-and-chocolate shop we’d been looking for!) and BAM, Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano, Library of Trees in Milan, a lovely botanical garden. For the buildings themselves:

Unipol Tower, Mario Cucinella Architects, 2015

Diamond Tower, BNP Paribas Bank headquarters. Jacobs and Kohn Pedersen & Fox, 2012 (Wikimedia photo; full credit below)

Torre Solea, Solaria, and Aria Arquitectonica, 2013

Unicredit Tower, Cesar Pelli, 2011 (Spire resembles Burj Khalifa, 2010, but I haven’t found a connection.)

Versace Headquarters, 2019 structure from 1970s

Palazzo Lombardia, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, 2011

Torre Gioia, Cesar Pelli, 2021

Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest), Stefano Boeri, Giovanni La Varra, Gianandrea Barreca, 2014. Didn’t we see something like this in a recent CAC exhibit?

Google Milan, William McDonough + Partners, 2010

IBM Studios, formerly Unicredit, Michele De Lucchi, 2015

When you go to see these beauties, be sure you also get to the Navigli district, Little Venice (there’s a canal), for a leisurely stroll among dozens of restaurants, bars, and shops of the sort that, if you’re like my wife and me, we used to gather in with friends back in our old young days.

Before arriving in Milan, we were expecting to see old European buildings, the opera house, da Vinci’s Last Supper, and lots of designer clothing shops. We did, of course, but also so much more. What an exciting place to visit!

Notes:

• Photograph of CityLife towers by KaiKemmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Photograph of Diamond Towers by Plfcln, This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
• Other photography and initial research by Jan Page with help from images.google.com.

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