Why you should experience Merlata Bloom Milan in Milan, Italy.
Merlata Bloom Milan is a sculptural retail complex where Cascina Merlata's post-Expo expansion, large-scale timber architecture, metropolitan leisure and the regeneration of Milan's northwestern edge converge between a new residential district and the former Expo grounds.
Set along Via Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler near Viale Triboniano and just steps from Parco di Cascina Merlata, the complex occupies the connective territory between UpTown and MIND, two districts whose development accelerated around Expo Milano 2015 and transformed a peripheral tract beside the A4 and A8 motorways into one of the city's largest concentrations of new housing, research, parkland and commercial architecture. Two curving buildings meet beneath an immense glazed timber roof whose branching structure reaches across the Central Winter Garden, creating a sequence closer to an enclosed urban street than a conventional shopping concourse. The roof rises as high as 15 meters across spans reaching 34 meters, opening the interior toward daylight, planted areas and the surrounding park through an unusually expressive structural system. The result is a retail complex whose scale belongs to Milan's twenty-first-century expansion but whose strongest architectural gesture comes from transforming engineered timber, glass and vegetation into the connective heart of an entirely new district.
What you should know about Merlata Bloom Milan.
Merlata Bloom Milan is best known for anchoring the connection between the UpTown residential district and MIND through a 70,000-square-meter commercial development conceived by CallisonRTKL and completed after four years of construction. Merlata Mall S.p.A. developed the project, with Nhood Services Italy handling its commercialization and management and more than 3,000 professionals participating across the construction campaign. The architecture divides the complex into two principal buildings joined through a Central Winter Garden, where Rubner engineered, produced and assembled a timber system incorporating 2,500 cubic meters of glulam and 500 cubic meters of X-Lam. Its largest timber spans reach 34 meters and climb to 15 meters, giving the central space a structural scale more commonly associated with major civic halls than retail interiors. CallisonRTKL extended the architectural concept through extensive glazing and an 8,500-square-meter glass dome, allowing the roof structure and daylight to become the principal visual elements across the interior. Construction of the timber roof concluded in April 2023, seven months before the completed center opened on November 15. More than 600,000 people entered during its first twelve days, an exceptional opening response for a development created to serve both the emerging residential population and the enormous post-Expo district beside it. The four-year construction campaign, 70,000-square-meter scale, immense glazed roof and highly engineered timber structure established Merlata Bloom as an architectural centerpiece of Cascina Merlata's transition from Expo-era expansion into a permanent metropolitan district.
The project's name emerged through consultation with local residents, with “Bloom” selected to express the idea of a germoglio, or sprout, before that botanical concept was translated into the building itself. Approximately 5,000 square meters of planted areas spread through the interior and exterior, and the development sits within 30 hectares of surrounding parkland that connect its commercial spaces with the expanding residential quarter. Entertainment became unusually prominent within the original program, occupying 10,000 square meters and including a Notorious Cinemas multiplex whose ten auditoriums introduced reclining seats, wireless charging and in-seat food ordering. Decathlon created another unusually large component through a two-level operation that reaches 7,000 square meters when combined with its adjoining offices. The scale of the development produced more than 2,000 jobs and was planned around a potential catchment exceeding 3.6 million people, placing its commercial ambition far beyond the immediate residential quarter. Merlata Bloom's first twelve days then supplied an early measure of that ambition, as the 600,000-person opening surge turned a building conceived as the connective piece between two emerging districts into an immediate metropolitan destination.
How to fold Merlata Bloom Milan into your trip.
Merlata Bloom Milan works as the anchor for a daytime progression through the Expo Village created for international delegates, the surviving architectural centerpiece of Expo Milano 2015 and the scientific institution that converted the exposition grounds into a permanent research district.
Begin at Expo Village Cascina Merlata, where seven residential towers were constructed to house more than 1,300 representatives and staff from participating countries during Expo Milano 2015 before conversion into subsidized housing. A 2008 competition had selected Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel and Partners, Caputo Partnership and Mario Cucinella Architects ex aequo for the wider Cascina Merlata scheme, and the eventual village brought together Mario Cucinella Architects, Teknoarch, B22 and Pura across 397 apartments occupying 30,500 square meters. Continue to Palazzo Italia, the five-storey pavilion designed by Nemesi for Expo Milano 2015, whose branching exterior was conceived around the image of an urban forest and rises 35 meters across 14,400 square meters. The building survived the exposition and subsequently became the institutional headquarters of Human Technopole, preserving one of Expo's principal national structures inside the district created from its grounds. Conclude at Human Technopole, the life-sciences research institute established by the Italian government in 2018 and developed around five principal buildings occupying 20,000 square meters beside the Tree of Life. Its laboratories now support research spanning genomics, structural biology, microscopy and genome engineering, with Palazzo Italia serving as the institutional center of a campus planned to gain another major laboratory building for as many as 800 scientists. The progression moves from international delegates temporarily inhabiting Cascina Merlata through Expo's national pavilion acquiring a permanent purpose into a scientific campus emerging across the former exposition grounds, tracing the sequence of events that transformed Milan's northwestern edge before Merlata Bloom Milan became its commercial centerpiece.
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