Into The Woods
There is a wood behind the wall.
You’d be convinced if I told you that’s one of the biggest park in Milano.
The scenery is a part of everyday life for neighbors:
Parents take their children for a walk beside the “isolated” woods.
People take a glance at it on their way to the centre of Milano.
The place already has its significance and all I think I have to do is to take down the wall and place the pavements within the site, into the woods.
The railway yard has never been a mere useless void: it has been present, creating the sense of a wood in the city. This presence, also coexists with Monumentale, right across the railway.
The way trees grow on the site seems spontaneous; however, they follow the railway tracks that still remains. The aim is to engage with this situation and to recall both the memory and story of the site from the urban scale to the detail.
Housing buildings are distributed rather loosely, having narrow gaps between each volume. Residents arrive at the courtyard passing through the gaps and find the staircase to go upstairs as if they climb the tree.
The kitchen and dining room are placed in front since they have a sense of community and publicness in the flat. The flat has generous flexibility by having light-structured panels so residents can organise the room. Walking through the flat, they reach out to the relatively closed loggia that frames the trees and illuminates the room in green.
