M.Sc. THESIS
“THE ROLE OF TALL BUILDING IN CASCINA MERLATA-EXPO 2015 AREA. A RESEARCH PROJECT ON TEMPORARY HABITAT, BORDER CONSTRUCTION, AND TERRITORIAL LINKS”
by Monica Bramanti, Beatrice Galimberti, Anna B. Rossi.
Supervisor Maria Grazia Folli
M.Sc. in Architecture-Building Architecture M.Sc.
Politecnico di Milano
A.Y. 2012-2013
We chose our M.Sc. thesis issue in 2013. At that time, Milan 2015 Universal Expo building site future was uncertain: which advantages would it have brought for territory during the six months of exposition? Which after? The conceiving of the Expo area as a fragment with a potential strong territorial influence was one of the few clear features. At the southern margin of Expo area, the construction of the settlement of Cascina Merlata had just started, envisaging a vast, oversized, introverted, and self-referential new 9.000 inhabitants district, with a mixed functional program (housing, temporary hospitality, commercial, leisure, offices).
Our goal was to redesign the northern border of Cascina Merlata, an area projected between two futures: the Expo and the new settlement. We preserved some aspects from the original use program of the northern border. Still, we felt free to radically chance many other aspects by enhancing the territorial connection, designing a new master plan, discarding the logic of the enclave through mobility and public space, and modifying the shape of the border. Being so close to high-speed infrastructure could be a key feature for territorial connections, tertiary, and temporary hospitality (northern border functions). We defined the highway border as a cell membrane (Sennet 2012), establishing physical relations with the nearest context and visual relations with infrastructures. For its positioning, dimension, and role, this project couldn’t be faced with typologies tools but with a volumetric way of thinking.
We focused particularly on one building of the master plan: the tower hosting different kinds of temporary hospitality (a 4star hotel, a budget hotel, and temporary housing). Through its vertical dimension, the tower is not just an Expo feature, but also an icon establishing visual relations with closest and farthest contexts.
We conceived our thesis as a research moment to set a coherent, complex, and realistic blueprint. We faced the issue from different points of view, to give an original contribution to forms of temporary habitat. To do that, we deepen the feasibility issues from a strategic, economic, structural, and technological point of view.
