Garage Traversi, Milan

Why you should experience Garage Traversi in Milan, Italy.

Garage Traversi is a striking Rationalist building where San Babila's refined commercial character meets Milan's early automobile age, a fan-shaped concrete structure and the engineering ingenuity of a vertical garage conceived for one of the historic center's most constrained parcels.

Set along Via Bagutta near Corso Giacomo Matteotti and just steps from Piazza San Babila, the former garage occupies a narrow wedge where curving glazed bands, pale masonry and streamlined horizontal lines rise behind the denser stone fronts of the Quadrilatero. Its facade separates two solid lower levels from six upper stories dominated by glass and sweeping curves, using the irregular parcel to sharpen the building's distinctive profile. Via Bagutta runs tightly beside the structure before opening into San Babila, placing its modern geometry against streets characterized by palazzi, luxury storefronts and the taller interwar buildings surrounding the square. The restored exterior retains the building's horizontal emphasis as its upper levels step above the adjoining roofs, making an infrastructure project from the 1930s unusually prominent within Central Milan. The result is an architectural outlier whose compact site, curved elevations and vertical organization capture the arrival of automobile infrastructure inside one of Milan's most valuable urban districts.

What you should know about Garage Traversi.

Garage Traversi is best known for translating the rapid growth of private motoring into Milan's first multistory garage, using mechanical lifts to stack hundreds of automobiles on a site too constrained for conventional parking architecture. The project emerged from the 1930s reconstruction of San Babila, where the parcel remained vacant beside new buildings erected between Corso Matteotti and the square. Its limited dimensions and single principal frontage made prestigious residential construction impractical, yet its central position created strong demand for automobile storage. Giuseppe De Min received the commission after working for the same client on a nearby San Babila building, and surviving architectural scholarship dates his project to 1936 to 1938. Alessandro Rimini is also connected with the design in later architectural histories, adding another significant figure from Milan's interwar building culture to the garage's development. A reinforced-concrete skeleton allowed De Min to shape the irregular footprint into a fan and divide the exterior between rectilinear lower floors and six parking levels marked by curved glazed surfaces. Automobile circulation avoided long internal ramps: vehicle lifts carried cars vertically through the structure, freeing far more of the restricted floor plates for parking. Contemporary technical descriptions place capacity at 350 automobiles, with washing and maintenance functions underground and reception, administration and display windows at street level. Fire protection divided parking areas through sliding barriers, integrating safety engineering into a building devoted to a relatively new metropolitan problem. Garage Traversi joined automobile storage, structural experimentation and mechanical circulation within a single purpose-built structure, turning an awkward remnant parcel from San Babila's reconstruction into a specialized machine for Milan's motorized city.

Closure in 2003 began a second architectural chapter centered on preservation and reuse of a building whose original function had become obsolete. Cultural protection followed in 2007, securing the historic structure after demolition proposals had circulated during the preceding years. The redevelopment process initiated in 2016 retained the existing building as the basis for a new commercial use and redistributed internal floor area through altered slab levels and additional volume at the top. Invesco Real Estate became associated with the property, and Società Progettazioni Integrali served as designer for the conversion, with engineering work extending through 2022. The intervention preserved the historic facade and recovered its characteristic coloration as the former parking floors were adapted for new occupancy. Louis Vuitton subsequently established a 2,000-square-meter boutique across three levels, with SPI acting as executive architect for the fit-out completed for the 2023 opening. The conversion returned public activity to a structure that had spent years largely vacant, shifting the building from automobile storage to fashion and cultural presentation without erasing the curved envelope that made the original garage distinctive. Garage Traversi consequently carries two successive periods of Milanese design culture within the same shell: interwar engineering created for the automobile and twenty-first-century adaptive reuse centered on the architectural value of that engineering.

How to fold Garage Traversi into your trip.

Garage Traversi works as the anchor for a daytime exploration through San Babila and the Quadrilatero using three nearby sites that move from Milanese Liberty architecture through an eighteenth-century aristocratic residence converted into a civic museum into Piero Portaluppi's interwar house for an industrial family.

Begin at Palazzo Castiglioni, commissioned by engineer Ermenegildo Castiglioni from Giuseppe Sommaruga and developed between 1901 and 1903 on Corso Venezia. Sommaruga placed rough serizzo across the base before shifting toward ceppo gentile, sculpted floral ornament and elongated openings above, bringing masonry, iron, glass and sculpture into a tightly coordinated facade. Ernesto Bazzaro created two female sculptures for the entrance whose nudity provoked such controversy that they were removed and later installed at Sommaruga's Villa Faccanoni, now Clinica Columbus. Alessandro Mazzucotelli contributed wrought iron to the interior staircase, extending the collaboration between architecture and decorative craft that made the palace one of Milanese Liberty's pivotal commissions. Continue to Palazzo Morando Attendolo Bolognini, a residence built toward the end of the sixteenth century and subsequently given the eighteenth-century character preserved across its principal rooms. The Morando family acquired the Via Sant'Andrea property in 1881, and in 1903 it became the home of Lydia Caprara di Montalba and Gian Giacomo Morando Attendolo Bolognini. Lydia left the palace, furnishings and art to the Comune in 1945, opening the path toward museum use; adaptation began during the 1950s, bringing the municipal collection of Milanese views into rooms that retain frescoes, stucco and aristocratic furnishings. Since 2010 the building has also housed the Comune's Costume and Fashion collection, whose holdings extend from the seventeenth century into the early twenty-first. Conclude at Villa Necchi Campiglio, designed by Piero Portaluppi between 1932 and 1935 for Nedda and Gigina Necchi and Gigina's husband Angelo Campiglio. Portaluppi developed the residence, garden, gatehouse, greenhouse, garage, swimming pool and tennis court as an integrated private compound for a family connected with Lombard industry, carrying the precision of his architecture into furnishings and domestic technology. Tomaso Buzzi altered portions of the interiors after the Second World War, adding another major Milanese designer to the house before the Necchi sisters entrusted the property to FAI. The collections of Claudia Gian Ferrari, Alighiero and Emilietta de' Micheli and Guido Sforni subsequently added works by figures including Mario Sironi, Giorgio de Chirico, Lucio Fontana and Pablo Picasso to the preserved domestic ensemble. The progression moves from Sommaruga's synthesis of architecture, sculpture and decorative craft through the conversion of an aristocratic residence into a civic collection and Portaluppi's complete interwar domestic commission, placing Garage Traversi within three successive approaches to design and patronage around San Babila.

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