Why you should experience Piazza Gae Aulenti in Milan, Italy.
Piazza Gae Aulenti is a dramatic contemporary plaza where Porta Nuova's postindustrial character meets César Pelli's elevated urban center, Milan's new skyline and the pedestrian network that reconnected districts long divided by railway infrastructure.
Set along Corso Como near Via Gaetano de Castillia and just steps from Via Vincenzo Capelli, the piazza occupies an elevated circular platform where glass towers, broad staircases, cascading water and raised walkways replace the railway yards and disconnected parcels that once separated Garibaldi, Isola and the former Varesine grounds. UniCredit Tower curves around the northern perimeter as Piuarch's Lower Armonica complex opens the opposite edge toward the surrounding pedestrian routes. An eighty-meter circular plate lifts the principal surface several meters above street level, allowing stairs and ramps to descend toward Corso Como as elevated paths extend toward the adjoining districts. Three elliptical openings cut through the center around pools and fountains, bringing daylight to the commercial level beneath the principal plaza. The result is a vertically layered public space where architecture, water and pedestrian circulation establish the principal gathering point within the wider Porta Nuova redevelopment.
What you should know about Piazza Gae Aulenti.
Piazza Gae Aulenti is best known for forming the physical and symbolic center of Porta Nuova, the vast redevelopment that finally gave built form to territory Milan had targeted for a new business center since its 1953 planning scheme. Railway infrastructure, the former Varesine station and successive unrealized planning proposals had left large parcels between Garibaldi, Repubblica and Isola fragmented for decades. A Programma Integrato di Intervento approved in 2004 and followed by its implementation agreement in 2005 established the mechanism for a new district across that unresolved territory. International architectural competitions subsequently distributed major commissions among several design teams, with César Pelli responsible for the masterplan of Unit U1 around the future piazza. Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects developed the circular public space together with the surrounding UniCredit complex, using the raised platform to connect pedestrian routes arriving at different elevations from Corso Como, Garibaldi and the redeveloped Varesine land. The piazza opened in 2012 and received the name of Gae Aulenti, the Milanese architect whose career ranged from postwar exhibition design to major museum conversions including the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Its circular geometry reaches some eighty meters in diameter and sits several meters above the surrounding streets, converting an infrastructurally fragmented site into a continuous pedestrian center. UniCredit Tower establishes the dominant architectural edge, its three curved buildings culminating in the 231-meter spire that made the complex a new vertical reference for Milan. Piuarch's Armonica occupies the opposite frontage without sealing the circle, preserving an opening toward the southeastern pedestrian network. Piazza Gae Aulenti consequently emerged as the central connective device within Porta Nuova, turning territory repeatedly assigned to unrealized twentieth-century planning into the principal public space of Milan's twenty-first-century business district.
Water, light and public art developed that connective role through a second architectural layer concentrated within the plaza itself. Three large elliptical openings pierce the elevated surface and expose the commercial level below, with pools arranged around their edges to create a continuous visual relationship between the two levels. Cascading water drops through portions of these openings, turning the change in elevation into a visible component of the square. A long curving bench follows part of the circular geometry and integrates an illuminated installation by Alberto Garutti consisting of twenty-three aluminum tubes connected with the surrounding public space. Solar Tree, developed by Artemide and designed by Ross Lovegrove, introduced another sculptural element through photovoltaic surfaces feeding LED illumination. Pedestrian bridges and ramps extend outward from the raised platform, giving the circular center direct continuity with adjacent parts of Porta Nuova. That network eventually reached the 90,000-square-meter Biblioteca degli Alberi, whose international competition produced the Inside Outside design led by Petra Blaisse. The garden supplied the wider redevelopment with the major open landscape anticipated within the Garibaldi-Repubblica plan and connected the piazza toward Isola and Via Melchiorre Gioia. Public space consequently became the element binding Porta Nuova's separate architectural commissions together, with Piazza Gae Aulenti operating as the elevated hinge between towers, commercial levels, pedestrian routes and the new urban garden.
How to fold Piazza Gae Aulenti into your trip.
Piazza Gae Aulenti works as the anchor for a daytime exploration through Porta Nuova and Isola using three nearby sites that move from railway archaeology through a contemporary landscape experiment into architecture devoted to Milan's twentieth-century political memory.
Begin at Fondazione Riccardo Catella, housed in a late nineteenth-century building originally constructed as a railway warehouse within territory later absorbed by Porta Nuova. The structure passed through several lives during the twentieth century, including use as a film set and contemporary-art laboratory, before restoration in 2006 established it as the foundation's headquarters and first physical project. Fondazione Riccardo Catella itself had been created in 2005 by the Catella family in memory of Riccardo Catella, whose work with Gerry Hines and Manfredi Catella during the 1990s helped advance redevelopment of disused territory that became part of Porta Nuova. The restored warehouse and its 4,000-square-meter public garden consequently preserve a surviving industrial structure within the district generated by that larger undertaking. Continue to Biblioteca degli Alberi, where Inside Outside under Petra Blaisse won an international competition for the principal urban garden connecting Porta Nuova's separate development areas. The 90,000-square-meter landscape organizes vegetation through circular forests, linear paths and planted fields, establishing a distinct geometry against the surrounding towers. COIMA assumed implementation from the Comune in June 2015, and Fondazione Riccardo Catella subsequently took responsibility for management and programming through a public-private agreement. Its position between Via Melchiorre Gioia, Isola and Piazza Gae Aulenti turns landscape into the physical link among districts previously separated by railway and vacant land. Conclude at Casa della Memoria, commissioned after Milan's City Council decided in 2010 to create a permanent home for associations devoted to the Resistance, Nazi deportation, terrorism and the massacres of the later twentieth century. Baukuh won the under-40 architectural competition in 2011, followed by construction between 2013 and 2015. The building opened on April 24, 2015 for the seventieth anniversary of the Liberation and brought ANED, AIVITER, ANPI, Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri and Piazza Fontana 12 dicembre 1969 into one institution. Its exterior uses large-scale portraits and historical images embedded across the masonry, converting the facade into a public commemorative surface within the new district. The progression moves from the reuse of a nineteenth-century railway building through Blaisse's landscape connecting the redeveloped district into Baukuh's purpose-built institution for twentieth-century memory, developing three distinct mechanisms through which Porta Nuova retained, reorganized and added meaning to territory transformed around Piazza Gae Aulenti.
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