Loreto’ Square, Milan

Piazzale Loreto is a Milanese urban space which, due to its location in the fabric of the city, has always played a pivotal role between the once more peripheral and popular city and the consolidated historic centre, without however ever having managed to adequately 

represent the different realities that surround it. 

The project for the competition of ideas therefore intends to transform the square into a square: the square that, since the first Polis, has always constituted a place of aggregation, concentration, union of different specificities; architecture and urban design direct and facilitate orientation by providing in this way a ‘tray’ to accommodate the new services and functionalities that the project envisages and that the communities will produce.

The project reorganizes and updates the traffic island function of the square, integrating the space around it with activities, places and proposals that favor its so-called ‘slow’ use, finally making the square a jewel just outside the center of Milan. With ‘A square in Loreto’ we have the possibility of creating a model of social innovation capable of bringing with it the generation of social, environmental and cultural value. 

The design of green spaces has aimed to bring nature back to the city through the introduction of new vegetation which includes tall trees and native shrubs. The new urban forest includes around 500 trees and 5000 groundcover shrubs arranged to define new spaces, isolated from the surrounding traffic, becoming the new design and environmental fulcrum of the square. 

It is, in fact, an opportunity to reinvent hybridization between the different environmental, social and urban parts: by uniting key subjects, such as social enterprises and new green areas, the square becomes a hub of active culture where services relating to renewed pedestrian traffic, nutrition, sustainability and the environment come together to contribute to improving the lives of citizens, directly involved in the life of the square. 

The project was selected for the second phase of the competition, coming third.