La Casa Urbana

Historical research has shown that at the start of the 20th century, the Milanese urban condition rapidly embraced the ideal of the industrial metropole. In the social dynamic typifying Milan at this time, the demand for a new dwelling typology for the expanding middle class grew. This thesis identifies a ‘Milanese School’ - spearheaded by architects like Muzio, Ponti and De Finetti - whose architecture responded to these challenges, addressing the scale of the modern city and the cultural residue of Milan’s history. Embedding a delicate balance between scale levels, they marvelously integrated the stacked, bourgeois dwelling in a representative urban gesture. Hence, the thesis considers this Milanese sense of coherence between architecture and the urban condition as a model worth pursuing in the design of a contemporary ‘Casa Urbana’ in the city’s centre.