/ 6 August 2004

‘Pasta towers’ to transform Milanese skyline

Until now, the city has been regarded as Italy’s industrial and banking capital, an austere place best known for its fascist-era railway station and its gothic cathedral.

But Milan’s skyline is about to undergo radical change. Three glassy skyscrapers are planned, under the direction of Daniel Libeskind, the principal architect for the new World Trade Centre in New York. They will overshadow the Pirelli tower, which for decades has been Italy’s tallest building.

”It’s really an unprecedented project,” Libeskind said. ”To create a spectacular new sort of 21st-century city, but a city which is connected with the traditions of the great architecture of Milan.”

Libeskind, together with Zaha Hadid of Iraq and Arata Isozaki of Japan, recently won the contract to design the three steel and glass towers, to be built over 10 years, as part of a glitzy, green complex of offices and flats that aim to change the shape and image of Milan.

Their bid, funded by Italy’s three largest insurance companies, Generali, RAS and Progestim, beat proposals from the Milanese architect Renzo Piano and the British architect Norman Foster.

The tallest skyscraper will be 218 metres high, with two shorter but striking bow-shaped and twisted neighbours. Building at the site, currently the Fiera convention centre that hosts Milan’s fashion week, will begin in 2006.

The towers will dwarf the elegant but dated 32-storey Pirelli tower, built in the heart of Milan’s financial district in 1956. The 127-metre Pirellone (”big Pirelli”) is the world’s tallest concrete towerblock.

Libeskind and his team have not been deterred by a bizarre incident months after the September 11 attacks, when a 67-year-old Italian-Swiss pilot crashed a light aircraft into the Pirelli tower, killing himself and two women working there. The pilot’s family business had collapsed a month earlier.

The â,¬1,5-billion project has been hailed in Italy as overdue for a city with a fast-moving lifestyle that is none the less dogged by an image of drab concrete office blocks and hulking, boxed-in landmarks.

Up to 1 300 bright apartments will be surrounded by a vast park, which Libeskind has described as a lung for the polluted, congested city.

Many people, although keen to modernise Milan, are concerned that it is foreigners who are doing the job. Other projects in the city are in the hands of the US-based Cesar Pelli and Lord Foster.

Some are simply unhappy with the Libeskind team’s plans. Antonio Monestiroli, the head of the architecture department at the city’s Politecnico University, says they have used leftover designs from other projects and picked striking shapes for publicity value.

Mariangela Mori, a 29-year-old fashion student in Milan, agreed. ”People will say they are like three different types of pasta,” she said. ”They don’t go together.” – Guardian Unlimited Â