The campus of museums and “City of Cultures” is located within a block of disused industrial buildings on the site of the former Ansaldo factory in Milan.Inspired by the typical Milanese condition of quiet,somebre Street Facades concealing beautiful,intricate courtyards,the project looked to emphasise the inevitably internalised quality of the existing site.As a formal intervention within an informal industrial complex,therefore,the proposal looked to accept and build upon these inherent characteristics through both the restoration of the existing industrial buildings and the introduction of a new and distinct central building as a focal point for the netwok of connections that the perimeter of the site encloses.

The programme for Ansaldo forms a mixture of both public and private facilities.Housed within the newly restored factory buildings will be Milan’s Archaeological Museum(relocated into a single structure from the two buildings it currently occupies in the city centre),the Centre for Advanced Studies of Visual Arts,and a workshop for a puppet company.

Alongside these existing buildings,and providing the main intervention on the site,will be the new Centre for Non-European Cultures.Containing a museum,archive and study centre,the building is distinguished by its free form,organic central hall,forming an internal courtyard(or court within a court)for both the Centre and site as a whole.Due to the tight surrounding context of the factory block,the surfaces of this new building have effectively been inverted:that is,the spaces they enclose and adjoin are turned inside-out and outside-in,sothat the representational space of the building is a more random assemblage of volumes reminiscent of the other industrial structures located within the complex.The spaces in between,therefore,become part of a formal sequence of external courts and passages,intertwining new and old architectures within the inner world of the Ansaldo block.

Client: Comune di Milano/Direzione Centrale Tecnica/Settore Musei e Mostre
Gross Floor Area:45,500 m2
Design Architect: David Chipperfield
Associate Architect:F&Architetti
Structural Engineer:Sajni e Zambetti
Services Engineer:Manens Intertecnica
Quantity Surveyor:Tim Gatehouse Associates/F&P Cantieri
Digital Imaging:David Chipperfield Architects

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