Malaspina masterplan
Milan, Italy
2017  Competition – First Prize

Project data
Program: Offices, Retail, Residential, Leisure, Public Spaces
Floor Area: 67,300 m2

A new living identity: Glamorous Green Living
The proposed design seeks to stimulate a new sensitivity to agriculture, preferring ecological progressive policies, defending biodiversity and local specificity.
Imagining an alternative and unconventional urban lifestyle that combines city density, services and technology to the principles of a healthy life immersed in nature, an equipped nature that can be experienced and enjoyed by its inhabitants. A place to live in green.

Plurality as a Value
The masterplan reinterprets the urban Milan city block by translating it into a new reality like the traditionally agricultural area of the Malaspina site.
The building typologies are a catalogue of urban buildings, where the variety and complexity of the buildings types creates a quality environment; in the variation of materials and shapes one can find here the characteristic values of living in the city, but immersed in the natural environment of the Po Valley.

Belonging to the Landscape – the “roggia”
The Masterplan wants to be rooted in the Lombardy’s water resources; the East-Milan area is covered by a very sophisticated irrigation network (Roggias) that has allowed the development of the region, giving fertility to the fields, safety to the land and urban centres and green oasis and ecological routes for the inhabitants.
There is a historical vocation of the site to the water, studying the Malaspina site water maps, we have identified the presence of different inactive and dry water lines and fountains.
The project proposes the construction of a water element that transversally divides the site from north to south, which becomes the heart of the real estate development of the area and a meeting place for future residents.

Green design
The project is part of the global biophysical context of the area creating a new balance in the respect of the existing nature.
In the Parco della Besozza grows a rich and complex vegetation, characteristic of the Padana Region, to which the design of the green refers to reinterpreting the typical elements of the Lombard farmland that are used with skilfully ornamental function.
The aim is to create an ecology more articulated, and therefore more stable, safer, healthier, and richer both aesthetically and biologically.
To strengthen the presence of the rural landscape around the area, we propose to allocate the Residential Green Areas as an accessible agricultural farm and open to residents.
The herbaceous crops of cereals and legumes, with ornamental purposes, are integrated into the green design of sports equipment, such as tennis courts, and meeting venues, such as a small amphitheatre.
It will be a way of discovering a new form of organic agriculture not aimed at exploiting the soil, but the aesthetic and ethical pleasure of life close to nature.
This new green area can be integrated into the agricultural area of ​​the “Besozza Farmhouse”.
In this landscape the fields, in the alternation of seasons, acquire different colours that make us realize the multiplicity of crops present, bordered by rows of trees, hedges or bushes.

Cycle paths
Malaspina is placed in a context where there are already available cycle paths that allow among other things to reach many interesting destinations such as the Castle of Mirazzano or the Tenuta Roverbella, the project includes three new sections of the cycle path: one along Caffe Street ‘that allows the distribution of the bicycle flow to the tertiary sector, one along the green and the last along the new road section south of the lot.

Team
Maurizio Mucciola, Maria-Chiara Piccinelli, Daria A. Moussavi

Landscape: ASLandscape