15 Milanese homes tell the story of a century of living

“Casa milanese” does not simply denote a building type. It is something more elusive and, at the same time, more tangible: a civic tradition of dwelling that runs through the city’s history.
Reducing Milan to a single housing form would be impossible. “Milanese homes” range from apartment blocks to urban villas, high-density slabs, bourgeois residences and social housing. What defines them is not form, but the architectural culture that produced them.
It is this distinctly Milanese attitude to architecture that has made the city a true disciplinary epicentre, generating episodes and languages that first became familiar to Milanese citizens, then to Italians, and eventually to the wider world. Rationalist, Novecento, modern or modernist: Milanese dwelling encompasses all of these, culminating in its contemporary iconicity.

The two buildings that Giovanni Muzio designed on Via Moscova already encapsulate the uniquely Italian nature of an eclectic – some would call it a compromise – style such as Novecento. Inside lies the modernity of reinforced concrete structures and expansive glazing; outside a scenography unfolds, of metaphysical arches, travertine, stucco, marble and trompe-l’œil. When the scaffolding came off in 1923, controversy erupted: “Ca’ Brutta” (the Ugly House) was instantly christened, and the Novecento style found its manifesto. This was the Milan of industrial capital and a self-aware bourgeoisie, suspended between modernity and metaphysics, capable of shaping entire neighborhoods and an imaginary that today resonates once more in contemporary aesthetics.

Walking along Via Mozart, one skirts Palazzo Fidia as it enters into dialogue with a symbol of that time: the Villa Necchi Campiglio by Piero Portaluppi. Luca Guadagnino enshrined it in the aesthetic pantheon of the new millennium by setting I Am Love there in 2009. The narrative seems to emerge directly from its forms – rational, yet solemn and monumental –where solid, abstract boiseries meet diamond-pattern inlays and travertine, alongside cutting-edge technology and the light, transparent structure of the façade’s greenhouse. Between the late 1930s and the 1960s, the Necchi family would bring in Tomaso Buzzi, steering the interiors toward a markedly more antiquarian sensibility. Yet this shift only sharpened the house’s identity, reinforcing its status as an icon of Milanese culture. The Rasini house and tower also belong to this context, a project where Gio Ponti and Emilio Lancia, from 1932, give architectural form to the threshold of Porta Venezia: a composition balancing Ponti’s rationalism with Lancia’s almost Art Deco echoes. The building dissolves into the nearby gardens through cascading terraces, while presenting a compact urban front marked by a semicircular head.

That very same Milan – more decisively than anywhere else, and not without friction with Rome – would also assert itself as the true epicentre of Italian Rationalism, as seen in the residential work of Mario Asnago and Claudio Vender. Here, the familiar elements of balconies and railings are not abandoned but reworked, translated into a new language of thin concrete slabs, taut, seamless façades and balustrades composed of horizontal metal bands. Close by, Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni confront the unfinished condition of the city’s expanding edge, shaping spaces such as Piazza Morbegno with buildings like Casa Lavezzari (1934), conceived for a somehow broader collectivity, the Modern Movement’s real counterpart. Its wedge-shaped plan, almost like the section of a V-engine, responds directly to the site; the intended concrete cladding was replaced by Botticino limestone, which over time has weathered, leaving the scene to a stark composition of intersecting horizontal and vertical planes. Across the railway, in the Villaggio dei Giornalisti, Luigi Figini’s own house (1935) takes this experimental drive even further: a white, Corbusian box with roof terraces and ribbon windows that frame the Alps, raised on pilotis stretched well beyond the canonical proportions set, for instance, by the Villa Savoye. A manifesto of Rationalism, unambiguously on display.

A change of scene. A full-height window, a not-quite-deep terrace, the foliage of a tree, a wall that returns the light with the muted sheen of clinker. In just a handful of elements, the face of postwar Milan comes into focus.
These are recurring figures – sometimes assembled, sometimes dispersed – across the work of what has been recently defined as professionismo colto, the golden age of cultivated practitioners. At the edge of Parco Sempione, the long and intricate genesis of Casa Tognella begins in 1947, where Ignazio Gardella refines the vocabulary of a new architectural language. Volumes are lightened, almost dissolved – “this house is more a play of diaphragms than a solid walled mass”, wrote Gio Ponti in Domus in 1951 – reduced to thin, calibrated planes between Botticino slabs and the pink-quartz-hued plasters.

Soon after, and very close, on Via Revere, the Torre al Parco gives form to Vico Magistretti’s idea of living in Milan. Yet perhaps his most distinctly Milanese collective housing work is the linear block that completes Piazza Aquileia (1961): a severe, measured slab, its deep terrace bands lending it an unexpected intensity, all in the service of an inward-facing ecosystem, a garden that conceals an almost invisible tower, organised around corner windows and terraces that open simultaneously onto greenery and the distant skyline. Corner windows would then return in the house that Luigi Caccia Dominioni built in Piazza Carbonari, alongside ribbon windows and paired openings of varying sizes, all set flush with the façade. On the northern edge of the city, these apertures alternately capture the still-visible Alps and an expanding Milan that is steadily advancing toward them, offering the city a new landmark, immediately recognisable in the hue of its clinker skin: crème caramel.

And yet this professionismo colto was anything but removed from experimentation. Casa 3 Cilindri by Angelo Mangiarotti and Bruno Morassutti rises on three concrete cores, freeing the ground level within a garden district near San Siro. Its curved façades were conceived as adaptable envelopes, allowing residents to calibrate transparency and opacity, where the modernity of the industrial city brushes up against distinctly Space Age aesthetics.

Industrial expansion turns Milan into a city of numbers as much as of forms: a plus grand nombre to be housed. It is, of course, a defining concern of modernism at an international scale, one that Piero Bottoni explored in the housing experiments of the QT8. But it becomes distinctly Milanese when it intersects with the the “local” discourse on a new rationality, understanding the city itself as architecture, the Architecture of the city.
It is within one of the most radical projects of this Milanese season of the modern city that inhabitants once again find themselves living inside a manifesto: the Monte Amiata complex at Gallaratese by Carlo Aymonino, into which Aldo Rossi inserts what he would later describe as “a blade cutting through the tangle of the plan.”
Rossi’s slab constructs the city through the measured sequence of its shear walls and their metaphysical shadows, before unfolding, starting from the first floor, into a shared residential world, where “the gallery signifies a way of life steeped in everyday events, domestic intimacy and a range of personal relationships”.
The clearing of the complex in 1974, then occupied largely by architecture students, marks a turning point in Milan’s housing struggles, a story that would go on to shape the city in the years that followed.

Milan would go on to redefine itself through large-scale transformations and new icons. The districts of Isola and Porta Nuova now converge around Piazza Gae Aulenti and its most celebrated landmark: the Bosco Verticale, completed in 2014 by Stefano Boeri Architetti, a “home for trees inhabited by humans”.  Its twin towers, rising 112 and 80 metres, that carry the plants in height by outfitting their terraces with large pots, are intended for a wealthier urban population, defining the new character of what had been working-class neighborhoods, and the cradle to several Milanese countercultures. Transformations that did not always go in the same direction, but always left a mark. In Crescenzago, among  decommissioned industrial estates, a farmstead has become the Son Cascina San Carlo: a cluster of public spaces and residences intended for urban frailties, where the brick texture typical of Lombardy's countryside construction meets forms with dramatic profiles that echo those pre-existing.

This idea of the Milanese home stems from the city’s capacity to surprise beyond its clichés. Few cities in fact integrate their natural landscape so intimately, often through one of Milan’s most characteristic devices: the courtyard.
Sometimes it makes room for nature, sometimes it recreates it – unexpected trees punctuate many courtyards – and sometimes it grows from it. In Brera, Giulio Minoletti’s Casa del Cedro (1959) was composed around a century-old cedar; in the late 1990s, Studio Albori embraced a paulownia tree in Porta Romana, shaping the urban façade into terraces for a cooperative housing project. Tree, terrace, house: whether modern or contemporary, in clinker or glass, it is the act itself of dwelling in Milan that has long made the “casa milanese” an autonomous architectural theme.