Why 10 Corso Como matters.
10 Corso Como is a secluded creative compound where Porta Garibaldi's fashion character meets a planted Milanese courtyard, early industrial architecture and a pioneering fusion of photography, design, publishing and retail.
Set along Corso Como near Piazza XXV Aprile and just steps from Via Tazzoli, the complex occupies a deep courtyard enclosure where a former garage, a traditional casa di ringhiera, climbing vegetation and upper terraces create an inward-facing world behind one of Porta Garibaldi's busiest pedestrian streets. A narrow street entrance opens into the planted court, placing the surrounding brick and plaster elevations behind a screen of foliage that separates the interior from the linear commercial corridor outside. Large industrial windows, covered passages and the preserved courtyard plan carry the building's earlier working character through spaces adapted for exhibitions, books, fashion and design. The surrounding district shifts within a short distance toward the railway infrastructure of Porta Garibaldi and the towers of Porta Nuova, making the low historic compound a striking survivor beside the vertical city that developed around it. The result is a deeply layered Milanese destination whose courtyard architecture gives cultural programming and fashion a physical setting inseparable from the transformation of Corso Como itself.
What you should know 10 Corso Como.
10 Corso Como is best known for Carla Sozzani's creation of a new cultural and retail model from a former working garage after nearly two decades spent in fashion publishing. Sozzani opened Galleria Carla Sozzani in 1990 inside the industrial building at number 10, establishing photography, art and design as the intellectual foundation for everything that followed. The fashion and design store arrived in 1991 alongside an expanded bookshop, turning the original gallery into the nucleus of a place Sozzani conceived through her editorial background as a living magazine. American artist Kris Ruhs became a central creative collaborator, developing the black-and-white graphic language associated with the address and extending his work across its visual presentation. The gallery built a substantial photography program through exhibitions devoted to figures including Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz, Paolo Roversi, Sarah Moon, David Bailey and David LaChapelle, alongside architecture, design and fashion projects involving Carlo Mollino, Verner Panton, Pierre Cardin, Courrèges and Paco Rabanne. Carla Sozzani Editore carried the curatorial activity into publishing, producing books devoted to photography, art, fashion and design as the adjoining bookshop became another permanent component of the project. The café opened within the courtyard in 1998, followed by the three-room hospitality project 3Rooms in 2003, extending the editorial concept across several forms of cultural consumption. International expansion began with 10 Corso Como Comme des Garçons in Tokyo in 2002, created with Rei Kawakubo, followed by Seoul in 2008 through a partnership with Samsung's Cheil. Carla Sozzani and Kris Ruhs established Fondazione Sozzani in 2016, transferring stewardship of the gallery's cultural work to an institution devoted to photography, fashion, fine art and applied arts. The address developed through those successive additions into an influential prototype in which an editor's curatorial practice expanded from exhibitions and books into fashion, design, food and hospitality within one physical compound.
A new architectural chapter began under Tiziana Fausti with the Rethinking 10 Corso Como project announced in 2023 and developed by the interdisciplinary agency 2050+. Renovation started that November with the aim of recovering the early twentieth-century industrial character beneath interventions accumulated during three decades of adaptation. The first completed phase opened in February 2024 with a redesigned Gallery and Project Room on the first floor. 2050+ returned the Gallery to a ring configuration with two entrances and introduced freestanding movable walls whose positions alter the exhibition layout. Large pantograph tables organize the Project Room, allowing books, magazines and design objects to shift among different curatorial arrangements. A second phase unveiled in September 2024 connected the ground and first floors with a new internal staircase and reconstructed the women's store as a flexible theatrical machine. Mobile clothing racks attached to winches move horizontally and vertically before disappearing among the ceiling beams, extending the transformable principle from exhibition architecture into retail. The intervention preserved exposed structural and industrial components as the connecting spaces between floors acquired a stronger architectural role. Lighting developed with HI LITE Next and Artemide uses A.24 tracks and Vector fixtures within the renewed exhibition areas. The 2024 work brought the building back toward its industrial origins through subtraction and mechanical flexibility, adding another architectural layer to a project that had begun thirty-four years earlier inside an active garage.
How 10 Corso Como fits.
10 Corso Como works as the anchor for a daytime exploration through Porta Garibaldi and the adjoining edge of Isola using three nearby sites that move from a nineteenth-century city gate through a converted railway institution into a contemporary building devoted to Milan's twentieth-century history.
Begin at Porta Garibaldi, built between 1826 and 1828 by Giacomo Moraglia after an earlier project by Luigi Cagnola had been abandoned under Austrian rule. The single Doric arch used stone from Viggiù and received sculptural decoration by Giambattista Perabò, whose four figures above the structure represent the Po, Adda, Ticino and Olona. Two customs houses followed during the 1830s, preserving the fiscal function of the former bastion entrance as military defenses lost their earlier purpose. The gate initially honored Emperor Francis I of Austria, then acquired its present dedication after Giuseppe Garibaldi entered Milan from Como in 1859 following the battles of Varese and San Fermo; the renamed arch carried that political turn into the northern entrance of the city. Continue toward the surviving railway fabric around Porta Garibaldi, where nineteenth-century transport severed the old Comasina road after Milan's first central station and its tracks crossed the corridor north of the gate. The railway transformed a road once directed continuously toward Como into two separated urban territories, accelerating the growth of working-class housing, workshops and industrial premises around the northern section. Corso Como's later redevelopment inherited that physical break, making the railway an essential mechanism behind the district's historic separation from Isola and its subsequent reconnection through the Porta Nuova works. Conclude at Casa della Memoria, conceived after a 2010 municipal decision to create a permanent home for organizations devoted to the Resistance, Nazi deportation and twentieth-century terrorism. Baukuh won the 2011 architectural competition, and construction extended from 2013 to 2015 before the building opened on April 24, 2015, one day before the seventieth anniversary of Liberation. Its compact 20-by-35-meter volume uses polychrome brick facades to reproduce historical images and portraits of nineteen anonymous Milanese citizens, turning the exterior itself into a large-scale commemorative surface. The progression moves from Moraglia's nineteenth-century reconstruction of Milan's northern gate through railway infrastructure that fractured and industrialized the old Comasina corridor into Baukuh's twenty-first-century institution for preserving Milanese historical memory, placing 10 Corso Como within three successive reinventions of the territory between the old city and Isola.
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