Why Ansaldo matters.
Ansaldo is a formidable industrial complex where Tortona's creative character meets a century of heavy manufacturing, immense brick workshops and the cultural reuse that turned former production halls into one of western Milan's principal arts districts.
Set along Via Tortona near Via Bergognone and just steps from Via Stendhal, the complex occupies an extensive former factory block where long brick elevations, sawtooth roofs, steel-framed windows and internal courtyards preserve the industrial scale that once distinguished this territory behind Porta Genova. Parallel workshop ranges stretch deep into the block, creating an architectural mass far larger than the residential and commercial buildings lining the surrounding streets. Broad entrances on Via Tortona and Via Bergognone lead into courtyards framed by production halls whose repetitive structural bays retain the physical character of large-scale manufacturing. Mudec and BASE now occupy major portions of the compound alongside cultural workshops and production facilities, extending public activity through spaces originally built for machinery and industrial labor. The result is an imposing piece of Milanese industrial architecture whose surviving dimensions make the transformation of Tortona from manufacturing quarter to cultural district physically explicit.
What defines Ansaldo.
Ansaldo is best known for preserving an industrial complex whose manufacturing history began decades before the company whose name eventually became inseparable from the site. Engineer Roberto Züst erected the first workshop on Via Bergognone in 1904 for automobile and truck production, establishing the earliest nucleus of a compound that expanded across the block during successive industrial occupations. AEG Thomson Houston acquired and enlarged the plant in 1908 for electromechanical manufacturing before transferring it in 1915 to Galileo Ferraris, another company active in electrical engineering. Galileo Ferraris expanded the property by absorbing a section of Via Moisè Loria, beginning the consolidation of smaller parcels into a larger manufacturing compound. Franco Tosi of Saronno briefly controlled the works in 1918, followed in 1921 by Compagnia Generale di Elettricità, whose sustained expansion produced additional workshops and the continuous industrial fronts along Via Bergognone and Via Tortona. CGE manufactured switchboards, radios, alternators, electric motors and railway equipment there, tying the factory to the electrification and transport industries reshaping twentieth-century Italy. Ansaldo entered the complex during the 1960s and used the plant for locomotives, railway carriages and tram vehicles, giving the site the name that survived the end of heavy manufacturing. Industrial contraction during the 1970s progressively emptied portions of the works as factories across Tortona withdrew from Central Milan. The Comune acquired the compound in 1989, bringing a manufacturing lineage begun with Züst eighty-five years earlier into public ownership.
Cultural conversion developed through a sequence of projects that retained the factory as a working compound for large-scale creative production. Teatro alla Scala established workshops inside former industrial halls in 1995, transferring scenery, carpentry and theatrical production into spaces whose dimensions had been created for heavy engineering. Milan subsequently selected David Chipperfield Architects to develop the Museo delle Culture within part of the site, with design and construction extending from 2008 to 2015. Chipperfield placed the museum behind the retained industrial exterior and organized its upper exhibition level around an irregular covered agorà, reached by a dark stone staircase and enclosed by translucent surfaces that separate the new intervention from the orthogonal factory shell. Mudec opened in 2015 with permanent collections, temporary exhibition galleries, an auditorium, conservation facilities and visible storage occupying the converted industrial fabric. Another 12,000-square-meter portion became BASE Milano in 2016 after the Comune initiated a redevelopment process through Officine Creative Ansaldo and a subsequent public project devoted to creative industries. The broader municipal compound extends across 44,000 square meters and in 2026 contains Mudec, BASE, Teatro alla Scala workshops, the Colla marionette workshop and the Museo di Teatro di Figura. Plans approved in December 2025 anticipate further reuse as Scala production moves to the Magnifica Fabbrica at Rubattino, continuing the compound's shift from industrial manufacturing toward cultural production without erasing the enormous workshop architecture that enabled both phases.
How Ansaldo fits.
Ansaldo works as the anchor for a daytime exploration through Tortona and the Naviglio Grande using three nearby sites that move from a converted food-storage building through a ceramic factory that became a laboratory for Gio Ponti into a medieval canal-side church created from two adjoining sanctuaries.
Begin at Armani/Silos, opened by Giorgio Armani on April 30, 2015 to mark forty years of his career. The four-level, 4,500-square-meter building originated in 1950 as a granary for a major international company, giving Armani an industrial container whose former purpose inspired the Silos name. Conversion retained the severe concrete exterior and broad internal volumes, providing a permanent setting for selections from decades of Armani fashion and an archive devoted to the designer's work. Its opening placed another major cultural conversion on Via Bergognone during the same year Mudec opened inside the former Ansaldo works. Continue toward the former Richard-Ginori works at San Cristoforo, where ceramic manufacturing created a substantial industrial settlement beside the Naviglio Grande and supplied Gio Ponti with one of the decisive laboratories of his early career. Ponti began collaborating with Richard-Ginori in 1923 and became its artistic director, working closely with highly skilled craftsmen as he developed ceramics that carried his emerging Novecento approach into serial production. He brought sculptors including Salvatore Saponaro, Fausto Melotti, Tomaso Buzzi and Bruno Innocenti into projects for the manufacturer, whose work appeared at the Monza decorative-arts exhibitions of 1925, 1927 and 1930. Conclude at San Cristoforo sul Naviglio, a double church assembled from two adjoining buildings beside the historic route toward Vigevano. The older sanctuary dates to the twelfth century, and the adjoining Gothic church reached completion by 1398; their union created two parallel naves divided internally by a pier, with timber roofing over the older portion and ribbed cross vaults over its later counterpart. The compact complex stands directly beside the Naviglio Grande, preserving the religious architecture of the canal corridor that preceded the factories later built farther along its banks. The progression moves from the conversion of a 1950 granary for Armani through Richard-Ginori's industrial collaboration with Ponti into a medieval double church beside the Naviglio, carrying Tortona's manufacturing history outward toward the older architecture and productive corridor of San Cristoforo.
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