Why CityLife matters.
CityLife is a striking enclave where Milan's historic fairgrounds meet a new architectural district through sculptural towers, broad pedestrian ground and landscaped space created from one of the city's largest twentieth-century exhibition territories.
Positioned between Fiera, Portello, and Pagano, the neighborhood occupies a western Milanese pocket where Viale Severino Boezio, Viale Cassiodoro and Piazza Giulio Cesare surround a former exhibition precinct opened back into the surrounding city. Towers rise from an expansive pedestrian center as lower residential buildings bend around planted ground, creating a pronounced shift in scale between the vertical core and the established streets along the perimeter. Piazza Tre Torri establishes the primary encounter through an open civic platform where architecture is read across long sightlines and movement occurs largely apart from surface traffic. The landscaped ground toward Piazza Giulio Cesare deepens the physical character through lawns, wooded sections, curved paths and changing elevations that replace the enclosed circulation once imposed by exhibition halls. Residential edges along Via Senofonte and Via Spinola introduce another architectural register through projecting balconies, irregular profiles and buildings positioned directly against the park. The result is a neighborhood conceived through the wholesale reopening of former fairground territory, preparing a history that links Milan's twentieth-century exhibition culture with an architectural competition that redrew the western skyline.
What defines CityLife.
CityLife is best known for transforming the former Fiera Campionaria into a 366,000-square-meter architectural district organized around designs by Zaha Hadid, Arata Isozaki and Daniel Libeskind. The underlying fair had begun elsewhere in Milan in 1920 before moving to the former Piazza d'Armi in the early 1920s, creating a permanent exhibition quarter that became deeply associated with the city's industrial and commercial ambitions. Eighty-five years after the first Campionaria, inauguration of the Rho-Pero exhibition complex in 2005 released the historic urban grounds for redevelopment. An international competition selected the CityLife scheme, with Hadid, Isozaki and Libeskind collaborating on the masterplan and subsequently giving distinct architectural form to its residential and office components. Construction moved first through the Hadid and Libeskind residences, followed by Isozaki's tower, completed in 2015 as the first of the three principal skyscrapers. Hadid's twisting office tower reached completion in 2018, and Libeskind's curved tower followed in 2020, turning three markedly different geometries into the central composition of the new skyline. The residential architecture extends those individual approaches at lower height: Hadid's buildings along Via Senofonte use sinuous balcony bands and rounded profiles, and Libeskind's buildings along Via Spinola employ faceted elevations and curving forms around landscaped courts. CityWave adds a fourth major architectural authorship through Bjarke Ingels Group, whose two office buildings are joined by a sweeping roof structure at the district's northern entrance. The sequence converted territory built for temporary exhibitions into a permanent concentration of internationally authored architecture, making the former fairgrounds a defining chapter in Milan's early twenty-first-century physical expansion.
Landscape design supplied a separate mechanism for restructuring the former exhibition enclosure and reconnecting ground that had spent decades occupied by halls, service routes and controlled entrances. An international competition held in 2010 selected the proposal developed by Gustafson Porter with One Works, Melk and Ove Arup for the new public park. The first section opened in 2013 with 317 mature trees drawn from 39 species, beginning the conversion of cleared fairground parcels into continuous planted terrain. The completed green system extends across 168,000 square meters in the municipal description, with 50,000 square meters devoted to tall-tree planting and another 72,000 to lawns and shrubs. Beech woodland, open grass, planted slopes and curving paths establish different landscape conditions across ground whose topography was extensively reconstructed during redevelopment. The Tre Torri M5 station opened in November 2015 directly beneath the new center, embedding rapid transit inside a district whose principal surface routes were conceived for pedestrians and cyclists. Opening of the CityLife Shopping District in 2017 added a commercial center designed by Zaha Hadid Architects around the station and tower base. Architecture, landscape and underground transportation consequently developed as connected pieces of the same spatial system, turning a formerly bounded exhibition precinct into traversable public ground between the established neighborhoods surrounding it.
How CityLife fits.
CityLife works as the anchor for an architectural walk through three surviving structures that trace the former fair district from interwar civic design through exhibition culture and Milan's international history of track cycling.
Begin at Fontana delle Quattro Stagioni, created by municipal architect Renzo Gerla in 1927 as Piazza Giulio Cesare was being prepared as a principal entrance to the Fiera Campionaria. Ambrogio Annoni had proposed placing a body of water in a depression prone to flooding, and Gerla developed the scheme under an intense deadline for the fair opening on April 12; Giovanni Trosti and Camillo Borioli handled its hydraulic and lighting systems, and four female figures personifying the seasons completed a composition in Sarnico stone whose original sculptures were subsequently lost to the 1928 bombing and wartime destruction before Eros Pellini supplied replacements in 1953. Continue to Palazzo delle Scintille, where Paolo Vietti Violi designed Milan's first indoor sports palace as one of the earliest permanent buildings of the new fair district. Construction began in November 1922 and reached completion in 1923, producing an elliptical central hall beneath an iron dome that accommodated cycling, boxing, exhibitions and automobile shows; after wartime bombing damaged Teatro alla Scala, the building became a temporary operatic venue in 1946, with Arturo Toscanini approving its adaptation for a hall exceeding 6,000 seats. Conclude at Velodromo Vigorelli, constructed in 1935 and inaugurated on October 28 as Milan consolidated a western sporting district around the fair. Giuseppe Olmo established a new hour record three days after the opening, and Fausto Coppi rode 45.798 kilometers there on November 7, 1942, placing the 397.7-meter wooden track at the center of international cycling history; its banked curves rise to 42 degrees, and 72 kilometers of Swedish-pine strips form the riding surface that later carried the name of six-time sprint world champion Antonio Maspes. The progression moves from Gerla turning the fair entrance into civic water architecture through Vietti Violi joining exhibitions, sport and postwar opera inside a permanent hall into a cycling arena where Olmo, Coppi and Maspes connected western Milan with international sporting achievement, preserving three successive mechanisms behind the territory CityLife later inherited.
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