projects | Viabizzuno progettiamo la luce

during the year of expo 2015 mudec – the museum of cultures – was inaugurated in milan within the industrial archaeological complex on the former ansaldo site, a place to discover and explore the culture of countries from all over the world. with this new facility the former ansaldo site, and the entire via tortona area, continues its metamorphosis from an industrial area into a centre of culture and creative entertainment. the industrial complex, which covers an area of 70,000 sq.m. opened in 1904 with the zust company, followed by aeg and later still by galileo ferraris. during the sixties it was used for the production of locomotives, railway carriages and trams; in the nineties the municipality of milan bought it in order to convert it into an area for the promotion and dissemination of cultural activities, a process still in progress today, that finds one of its manifestations in the very creation of mudec, a huge structure that is about to become a new location for the city, a landmark that is transversal, multidisciplinary and attentive to contemporary language, for the exchange of ideas and creative output. the project for a museum of cultures originated in the 1990s when the city of milan acquired the former ansaldo industrial area for use for cultural activities. the disused factories, real monuments of industrial archaeology, have been transformed into workshops, studios and new creative areas. within this scenario the municipality of milan designed a multidisciplinary centre dedicated to the different items and cultures from around the world, a centre for exhibiting ethnographic collections from different places. the museum of cultures, conceived within a socio-economic context that differs greatly from that of today, has had to be rethought in the light of a complexity that was probably inconceivable at the end of the nineties. the intercultural vocation that inspired it, finds its expression today in a project capable of answering the call, that over the years has become increasingly widespread, of a cultural public in a landscape in constant transformation, for museums, their sustainability and their identity in a context of scientific research, testimony from the past, interpretation of the present and vision of the future. designed by the architect david chipperfield, winner of the tender organized by the city of milan in 1999 for the design of the first plot of the future city of cultures, mudec presents visitors and the city with a variety of cultural offerings and services distributed across 17,000 sq.m.: the room for the museum’s collection and the temporary exhibitions, auditorium, mudec bistro, mudec design store, mudec club restaurant, classrooms, mudec junior and car parking. inspired by the typical milan buildings with their quiet and faded façades that hide intricate interior spaces, the project intends to emphasize the qualities, inevitably hidden, of the existing site. as a formal intervention in an informal industrial complex, the project proposal embraces the intrinsic qualities of the place building on them, not only through work to restore the existing industrial buildings, but also with the introduction of a new central building, the focal point of the network of connections enclosed within the perimeter of the site. the compactness of the surrounding factory buildings, in fact, causes the surfaces of this new building to be inverted. the spaces which enclose and aggregate are reversed in the relationship between exterior-interior, as a result of which the space of representation of the building is rather an assemblage of volumes reminiscent of the industrial structures of the complex. the interstitial spaces, contained within the transparent double-skinned glass façade of the hall, become part of a formal sequence of external courtyards and passageways that interconnect the new and the old architecture with the inner world of the ansaldo blocks. the new cultural centre features square-shaped bodies coated in zinc and reflected in the linear presentation of the lighting system integrated in the handrails designed specifically for the museum. only one element encroaches both geometrically and emotionally into the building that contains it: a freeform and organic structure made entirely of glass located at the centre of the site and illuminated 24 hours a day creates an internal courtyard, in the characteristic shape of a ‘flower’, a covered square, a meeting place between cultures and communities. even mudec’s management is innovative: in fact, it is the first Italian museum to be run by a partnership between the public and private sectors. the municipality of milan handles the scientific management of the heritage, its development and the coordination of the activities of the world city forum. 24 ore cultura – gruppo 24 ore is responsible for the planning and implementation of major international exhibitions and the management of mudec’s additional services in the different areas of which it is composed.