Why you should experience UniCredit Tower in Milan, Italy.
UniCredit Tower is a soaring contemporary skyscraper where Porta Nuova's industrial inheritance, railway redevelopment, international architecture and twenty-first-century financial power converge above Milan's most ambitious modern urban transformation.
Set along Piazza Gae Aulenti near Via Fratelli Castiglioni and just steps from Corso Como, the skyscraper rises across former railway territory whose transformation began after the 1961 closure of the old Varesine station, leaving a vast central tract that passed through decades of abandoned plans, temporary fairgrounds and fragmented development before Porta Nuova finally reconnected Garibaldi, Isola and the historic center. The complex rises directly from the circular piazza through a curving glass facade whose vertical lines draw the tower into the public space below before accelerating toward its asymmetrical summit. A slender illuminated spire carries that movement far beyond the occupied floors, turning the building into a metropolitan marker visible across Milan and establishing a radically different vertical counterpoint to the city's historic skyline. The result is a skyscraper where the recovery of obsolete railway land culminates in an architectural composition designed simultaneously as corporate headquarters, public-space centerpiece and unmistakable signal of Milan's contemporary expansion.
What you should know about UniCredit Tower.
UniCredit Tower is best known for becoming Italy's tallest building by architectural height through a 231-meter composition designed by César Pelli and developed as the centerpiece of the Porta Nuova Garibaldi redevelopment. Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects conceived the tower as the tallest of three curving glass buildings arranged around Piazza Gae Aulenti, with the principal structure reaching 146 meters before its spire extends the total height to 231 meters. Hines Italia led the wider Porta Nuova development under Manfredi Catella, bringing together more than 20 architectural and engineering practices across one of Europe's largest urban redevelopment projects. UniCredit agreed in 2009 to consolidate its Milan operations within the complex, creating a headquarters capable of gathering thousands of employees previously dispersed across multiple properties. Construction advanced through the global financial crisis before the tower was completed in 2012 and the headquarters became operational in 2013. The building subsequently received the 2012 Emporis Skyscraper Award, whose jury placed Pelli's Milan tower first among skyscrapers completed worldwide that year. Its 231-meter height, corporate consolidation, international design authorship and recognition transformed a former railway district into the location of the tallest architectural profile in Italy.
The spire produced the tower's most technically dramatic construction episode. Approximately 85 meters long and weighing about 80 tonnes, the steel structure was assembled in sections before being lifted into position by helicopter on October 15, 2011, extending the building from conventional high-rise scale into the form that determines its official architectural height. Its perforated exterior was engineered to reduce wind pressure, and an LED lighting system subsequently turned the spire into a programmable element of Milan's nighttime skyline. César Pelli brought to the commission a career already encompassing New York's World Financial Center and Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers, whose 452-meter height had made them the world's tallest buildings upon completion in 1998. Porta Nuova placed that international high-rise experience within a distinctly Milanese planning problem: reconnecting neighborhoods divided by railway infrastructure and creating substantial public space around privately developed architecture. Qatar Investment Authority acquired a 40 percent interest in Porta Nuova in 2013 before purchasing the remaining 60 percent from the project's original investors in 2015, taking full ownership of a development valued at more than €2 billion. Pelli's architecture, the helicopter-installed spire and Porta Nuova's multibillion-euro ownership transition connect UniCredit Tower with the engineering, capital and international investment that carried Milan's former railway territory into a new economic era.
How to fold UniCredit Tower into your trip.
UniCredit Tower works as the anchor for a daytime progression through an industrial railway structure reclaimed as civic infrastructure, an experimental residential forest and a cultural foundation that completed Porta Nuova's transformation from disconnected redevelopment sites into a new section of Central Milan.
Begin at Fondazione Riccardo Catella, housed in a former railway building constructed in 1898 as part of the infrastructure serving the nearby Garibaldi and Varesine rail territory. The structure survived the disappearance of the old railway landscape and underwent restoration under architects Michele De Lucchi and Mario Cucinella, reopening in 2007 as the headquarters of the foundation created by the Catella family in memory of Riccardo Catella. Its survival gives Porta Nuova an architectural fragment from the transport system that once occupied the land now dominated by towers, parks and pedestrian routes. Continue to Bosco Verticale, where Stefano Boeri Architetti developed two residential towers completed in 2014 at heights of 80 and 112 meters, carrying hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs and perennial plants across projecting balconies. Laura Gatti and Emanuela Borio developed the planting strategy with the architects, and Arup contributed structural and environmental engineering to a system requiring trees to withstand wind exposure at elevation. The project received the International Highrise Award in 2014 and CTBUH's Best Tall Building Worldwide in 2015, turning the Isola edge of Porta Nuova into an internationally influential experiment in integrating vegetation with high-rise housing. Conclude at Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, where Herzog & de Meuron completed a sharply pitched linear building in 2016 beside Porta Volta for an institution whose origins reach to the library established by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in 1949. The collection developed into an important center for the study of political, economic and social history, and the new headquarters placed its reading room beneath the steep roof at the top of a building whose repetitive structural frame deliberately recalls the long agricultural buildings of Lombardy. The progression moves from De Lucchi and Cucinella preserving a fragment of Milan's railway age through Boeri, Gatti and Arup turning residential towers into an experiment in vertical planting into Herzog & de Meuron giving a major intellectual collection a new architectural home, revealing the industrial recovery, design experimentation and cultural investment surrounding UniCredit Tower.
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