Why Oxy.gen matters.
Oxy.gen is a contemplative scientific pavilion where Bresso's parkland character meets Michele De Lucchi's floating air-bubble architecture, an artificial lake and a public project devoted to the physical and environmental dimensions of breathing.
Set along Via Campestre near Via Meucci and just steps from the wooded paths of Parco Nord Milano, the pavilion occupies the edge of a purpose-built lake where lawns, young woodland, pedestrian paths and the open Giardini della Scienza separate its rounded shell from the dense metropolitan fabric surrounding Bresso. A narrow bridge crosses the water to the building as its pale faceted envelope rises above the lake on slender supports, reducing the visual contact between architecture and ground. Natural light enters through openings distributed across the shell, changing the interior appearance as daylight moves across the surrounding water and park. The lake extends the pavilion's rounded silhouette through reflection and places the approach within a landscape of water, meadow and trees before the interior scientific program begins. The result is an immersive piece of architecture whose form, approach and park setting turn the physical act of breathing into a spatial idea before the scientific content is encountered.
What defines Oxy.gen.
Oxy.gen is best known for translating Zambon's idea for a public center devoted to breathing into a purpose-built pavilion by architect Michele De Lucchi. The project emerged through collaboration among Zambon, Parco Nord Milano, the Comune di Bresso and Regione Lombardia, connecting a pharmaceutical group with public institutions responsible for the surrounding metropolitan park. De Lucchi developed the building as an air bubble, giving architectural form to the subject that would organize its scientific program. Construction lasted 90 days and required excavation of 10,000 cubic meters of earth before the resulting basin received an equal volume of water. Twenty-three steel columns support the structure, whose construction incorporated 80 cubic meters of concrete, 40,000 kilograms of steel and 500 cubic meters of membrane covering. The pavilion opened in November 2014, establishing a new scientific destination inside the Giardini della Scienza. Its creation formed part of a broader rehabilitation of neglected ground beside the OpenZone health-science campus, tying the new building to an effort to reconnect previously compromised territory with the surrounding community. Zambon also contributed five hectares of green ground to Bresso as part of the Giardini della Scienza initiative, expanding the public landscape around the pavilion. Oxy.gen joined architecture, health science and landscape construction through a project in which the building's air-bubble form developed directly from the scientific subject assigned to it.
The pavilion's internal organization develops breathing through a single polyhedral chamber whose scientific content moves between the human organism and the surrounding environment. Educational programming divides the subject into two principal strands, one centered on anatomy and physiology and another devoted to ecological processes. A twelve-stage educational sequence examines oxygen and respiration through experiments, games and video, connecting the mechanics of the respiratory system with atmospheric composition and plant production of oxygen. Multimedia infrastructure supports this changing program through three projection screens operating independently or as a combined image surface. Mobile furnishings allow the uninterrupted chamber to be rearranged for scientific presentations, educational activities and public discussions. Natural illumination enters the interior alongside the digital systems, maintaining a direct visual relationship between the scientific program and the park surrounding the shell. The adjoining lake belongs to Parco Nord Milano's artificial water network, which draws from the Villoresi Canal and wells across Milan, Bresso and Cinisello Balsamo to sustain ponds, lakes and irrigation channels throughout the park. Oxy.gen places its study of human respiration inside that larger constructed environmental system, joining physiological science with the air, vegetation and water beyond the pavilion walls.
How Oxy.gen fits.
Oxy.gen works as the anchor for a daytime exploration across Bresso and Parco Nord Milano using three nearby sites that move from an eighteenth-century noble residence through surviving wartime infrastructure into an industrial building repurposed during the creation of the metropolitan park.
Begin at Villa Patellani De Bortoli Rivolta, already present on the maps of the Catasto di Carlo VI after Giuseppe Antonio Perini received the Bresso fief and title of count in 1717. Major work after the 1730s doubled the depth of the principal residential block and added two lower lateral wings, producing the U-shaped composition whose central section carries a three-arched portico on paired columns. The rebuilding altered the surrounding settlement as well as the villa, requiring demolition of another structure and relocation of the public road farther from the residence. Rivolta ownership began in 1941 and brought removal of agricultural outbuildings and industrial construction within part of the grounds; Bresso acquired a substantial section of the park in 1968, converting former private land into public green space. Continue to I Bunker Breda, surviving air-raid shelters constructed for workers in the fifth aeronautical section of the vast industrial complex that occupied this northern metropolitan territory during the Second World War. The underground network once extended much farther toward Bresso airfield, though a section measuring 32 meters survives for interpretation. War production made the surrounding industrial district a bombing target, leaving the shelters as physical evidence of the relationship between factory labor, military aviation and aerial warfare. Parco Nord recovered the surviving section and created a permanent installation with Ecomuseo Urbano Metropolitano Milano Nord in 2009, placing wartime infrastructure inside woodland established after industrial decline. Conclude at Cascina Centro Parco, an industrial-era building once owned by Breda and used in support of its workers' canteen. Creation of Parco Nord gave the structure an entirely different role, and rehabilitation carried out between the 1980s and 2000 converted it into the operational center of the park. The complex now contains the park administration, agricultural workshops, nursery and environmental facilities alongside the Casa del Parco and the AREA Parchi documentation center, preserving an industrial building within the institution responsible for the vast green territory that replaced much of the former factory landscape. The progression moves from Perini's eighteenth-century noble estate through wartime shelters built for an aeronautical workforce into the reuse of Breda architecture during Parco Nord's creation, developing three successive transformations of the territory surrounding Oxy.gen.
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