“[…] like barbarians outside the walls, the shapeless, leftover, untidy peripheries, abandoned industrial areas, and unplanned zones insist on taking part in the cultural banquet. It is politics’ task to give it a meaning, while it is the task of next millennium architecture to design its appearance”. This is how, in one of his articles in the Il Sole 24 ORE cultural magazine, professor Fulvio Irace described the big transformations underway in contemporary city suburbs.
In Milan, like in many other cities in the world, we are still seeing the phenomenon of the regeneration of decaying industrial areas. In the south of the city, at the Porta Romana railway station, a couple of kilometres as the crow flies from the cathedral, the presence of the now abandoned railway track has made such a deep split in the urban fabric that, as soon as you cross the bridge, you get the feeling you’re going into a different town, a timeless, silent place where long concrete walls flank semi-deserted streets, bright signs are replaced by lush creeping ivy, and large iron gates still close off the tracks. In this place, the chaotic atmosphere of the centre seems to have been substituted by a grim 1960s Pasolini film set.
But what would happen if all of a sudden you discovered that, outside the walls, something totally unexpected was awaiting you, something shaking up the values that regulate the lives within them?
Are we still prepared to accept different realities or is the contemporary city only held up by certainties consolidated by time and custom?
In fact, by rights this area on the outskirts of the town centre should deserve a place on a tourist map of Milan. Singled out as the place where you can admire the last remaining part of real Milan, it’s a picture postcard of part of the city where the principles that generated it have remained unaltered: the big production plants built here thanks to the railway station.
An ambiguous situation very similar to what happened in Berlin, where the Wall meant that the depressed GDR economy preserved the eastern part of city in the same condition as at the end of the war. A negative precondition whose removal was explosive: while one side of the city was handed back in its most authentic form, on the other side of the wall, in the West, they were making haste to rebuild quickly and in grandiose style.
Here in Milan, hordes of “cult” tourists should pass through here, to get a different point of view of a hidden and unusual city, while reflecting on what the future holds in store for this area (like in the former trade fair district or the Tortona neighbourhood). Will it be somehow possible to trade in a dizzying increase in prices per square metre or the appearance of multiscreen cinemas and multipurpose buildings with a deeper reflection that can give rise to the application of equally as loaded, but new concepts such as authenticity, nostalgia, ambiguity and “anti-ism”? On the notion of authenticity and nostalgia, in The Future of Nostalgia Svetlana Boym stated, “At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress”.
Attention to the concept of nostalgia can have devastating consequences on a city:
growing resistance to accepting changes and modernization in historical contexts as inevitable evolution; philological restoration focused on literally rebuilding the past; primitive regulations that force new projects to look like the old, generating a blurred mix of past and present “authenticity”.
The authenticity of this district lies in the acceptance that the industrial past of these desolated enclosures and depots has handed down to us an untouched, traffic-free, human-scale area, whose abandoned, large and “generic” buildings can be transformed to spawn new plans.
Within one of these areas, the industrial space has been transformed into a museum of contemporary art, Fondazione Prada: a manufacturing site elevated to the rank of public space for leisure and culture. Pretty daring as a plan, but on the other hand what could we expect from the collision of two “entities” such as Prada and OMA? What result could come from the meeting/clash between the company that started out selling handbags made from army parachute nylon and the firm whose first slide in its promotional meetings always reads
“challenge vs comfort”?
Both careers have been strongly inclined in the “anti-ist” direction, both in cultural terms and, as a consequence, aesthetically speaking too.
I remember one of the first meetings I had with signora Prada. I showed her, with a certain pride, the range of options we had put together to sort out every possible doubt on choices and combinations of materials. At a certain point I met her gaze, which was bordering somewhere between annoyance and boredom.