LESS SOIL CONSUMPTION, MORE PUBLIC SPACE
by Monica Bramanti, Beatrice Galimberti, and Anna B. Rossi
Urban and Territorial Design Studio, M.SC. in Architecture-Building, I year, Politecnico di Milano
Profs Martina Orsini, Camillo Magni, Marco Baccarelli
A.Y. 2011-2012
Starting from a morphological study of Milan southern area, we worked on two different issues, both referring to the quality of life in a compact city. The first one concerns public spaces. The other one deals with the cease of soil consumption. How to combine those two topics? We observed that in the whole city there is a great number of supermarkets with huge single or multi-storey parking on the rooftop, all of them highly underused. Most of the time, those spaces are quasi-desert non-lieux, that people cross fast and unpleasantly.
We found out that the underused parking lots on the rooftops are scattered in a quite isotropic way. Thus, we proposed to partly transform them in neighbourhood-scale public spaces. In this way, without any soil consumption, we designed gathering places, having the possibility to locate them in spaces as popular as supermarkets are.
We set up a strategy for the transformation of these rooftops, adapting our actions to different contexts we faced. We focused deeply on two different cases.
The first one is the stage for the design of our blueprint Agor Up I. It is located inside an urban block. Thus it involves the relationship between the publicness of the supermarket and to inhabitants’ private and collective spheres.
The other one hosts our project Agor Up II, in which we worked on a free-standing mall by conceiving a new rooftop and a new arrangement for the open area at the ground floor.