Scraper IN MILAN, ABOUT WIND SEEDS…

of Jacopo Muzio

original article: http://www.arcipelagomilano.org/archives/35562

Until the 6 December at the Catella Foundation of Via De Castilia in Milan the exhibition "Scraper" is visible, Monza curated by Alessandra Coppa. Inaugurated under the banner of a memorable speech by the curator "Verticality is in the city's DNA, starting from the main spire of the Cathedral of Francesco Croce"And with a permanent model of the Porta Nuova-Garibaldi transformation area at the center of the exhibition space (partly owned by the Texan multinational Hines), the exhibition itinerary begins with the drawings of the Galfa tower, former property of Catella's mentor, Salvatore Ligresti, to conclude with a collection of postcards from New York by Italo Rota.

A collection of video interviews with members of an evergreen side Milanese - from former mayor Gabriele Albertini to Roberto Caputo - accompany a video projection with marked promotional features that exemplifies, with a graphic solution to growing mushrooms, the evolution of "cloud scratchers" from the Duomo to the Unicredit tower, seamless.

In the videos some subdued admissions of guilt (Fuchs: “Let's face it: skyscrapers are the only happiness of building contractors“; Cino Zucchi: “The skyscrapers are GMOs“) they alternate with a majority corporate support from authoritative magazine editors, designers, heirs of designers, heir designers. The voices of good critics for each season, bewitched by the design of the "foot" of the buildings in Piazza Gae Aulenti and its surroundings, able to "generate neighborhood" (after all, as it is known, Catella Foundation has as primary mission the "People's Projects", with a capital letter) "Fluidizing the flows" instead of "making a cap", accompany the visitor to the exit. On foot, in the afternoon desert, only the pouring rain awakens the senses from so much flicker, recovery even more abrupt if accompanied by the reading of "Hands on Milan”By Franco Stefanoni, Laterza editions, 2014.

Despite the solicitations of the exhibition and the interviewees, The thesis according to which skyscrapers are in Mediolanum's DNA is neither historically nor critically convincing, who "genius loci“, if you really need to imagine one, as Vittorio Gregotti claimed, it is closer to the horizontality of the water meadows, rice fields, of the farmhouses, of the convex horizon of the Po valley and the rows of plane trees.

Milan is not San Gimignano, located on top of a hill on the Via Francigena, where the towers initially grew as a defense observatory but soon became a sterile symbol of feudal power, as observed by Le Corbusier on the occasion of his Italian Grand Tour. Milan is not even Pisa, where the Florentines, immediately after the conquest, they decided to have all the superb towers of the city pollarded, as a future antidote to stiff neck. Milan - sugar and tar, as Lucio Dalla sang - he underwent the deliberately wider dome of San Pietro and higher than the Duomo, the work of Don Verzè for "his" San Raffaele (to us today the debts, Thank God!) with at the top a menacing archangel all naked and gilded, brighter than the Madonnina.

In Milan, factories have been forgotten, the railing houses, the stadium, even the destruction of the Lazzaretto and the intention to build on the Sempione park; the bombings have also been forgotten, the Villa Triste and the Resistance ... but at least the "you vvò ago the American“, I want it but I can't, no! What a sterile discussion, in the 2015, support and legitimize the policy of new skyscrapers inspired by Dubai's cultural desert, yet another tax haven; Blade Runner versus Delirious New York, where the extension of each skyscraper corresponds to the economic power of one major; who knows what the Milanese masters and intellectuals mentioned in the exhibition as Gio Ponti would really think, Dominioni hunting, Castiglioni, i BBPR, Gae Aulenti, but also Strehler or Pasolini, of this tribute to the Ambrosian brick rite, five million square meters built in the last decade, to the vision of the world of the new masters of the city.

Skyscraper, profit maximization in the smallest possible area, where there are those on the upper floors and those on the lower floors, all passionately united in an air-conditioned fridge with stellar costs per square meter, corresponds to a precise form of mind.

In Paris when they made an exhibition of the kind wanted by Sarkozy's right wing, there was a popular half uprising. In Milan, that he lost 400.000 inhabitants and the value of the brick has dropped inexorably, where the banks, after the judiciary, they took what remains of real estate empires of obscure origins, where organized crime is a real colossal, also made of excavations and concrete mixers - not like in the beggars "Gangs of New York”- we thought we had left behind a cinematic future from Gotham City, from a decadent province of the Anglo-Saxon empire, badly copied in the romantic sketches of Sant’Elia.. and what happened to Batman?