Milan, 1957–1973: these are the coordinates from which the new book published by Humboldt Books begins. Part of the publisher’s Time Travel series — now in its twenty-sixth volume and dedicated to the rediscovery of twentieth-century archives by photographers, artists and architects — the book brings together the images of Paolo Monti, the photographer who captured Milan before contemporary Italian architectural photography truly existed. The result is an atlas of postwar Milan: a city of reconstruction sites, empty lots left behind by bombings and rapidly absorbed by the economic boom. This was the golden age of Milanese architecture — the era of BBPR’s Torre Velasca, Gio Ponti and Pier Luigi Nervi’s Pirelli Tower, the rise of the business district and the new infrastructures that would transform Milan into Italy’s economic capital.

And it is precisely with the Pirellone that this photographic narrative begins. Throughout Paolo Monti’s career, the Pirelli Tower remains the central protagonist. A visual obsession. Much like Campbell’s Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe or the Statue of Liberty for Andy Warhol — or Montagne Sainte-Victoire for Cézanne — the Pirellone constantly reappears in Monti’s photographs: from afar, from below, in details, interiors, daylight and night scenes alike. More than documenting the building, Monti seems intent on dismantling it visually. Designed between 1956 and 1960 by Gio Ponti and Pier Luigi Nervi, the Pirelli Tower still stands today as the great icon of Milanese modernism. Monti photographs it as though it were a sculpture, with an almost obsessive attention to construction details.

If the Pirellone is light, vertical and elegant — close to the ideals of international modernism — then Torre Velasca, designed by BBPR between 1956 and 1958, is its perfect counterpart. Yet in Monti’s photographs, the tower appears less distant from the Pirelli than one might expect. Here too return modular structures, geometric repetitions, diagonal forms and serial windows. Rather than opposing two visions, Monti reveals the different faces of the same Milanese modernity.

What makes the book especially compelling, however, is that it goes beyond the major monuments of Italian modernism. Around the Pirelli Tower and Torre Velasca, a new city gradually emerges — filling the voids left by wartime destruction and expanding through the new subway system designed by Franco Albini and Franca Helg, with visual identity by Bob Noorda and inaugurated in 1964 with the opening of its first line, alongside new infrastructures and a radically different idea of urban living. The book also features the architecture of Vittoriano Viganò, Luigi Moretti, Vico Magistretti, Giuseppe Pagano and Giovanni Muzio: buildings that may be less photographed today, yet remain essential to understanding postwar Milan.

Monti photographs Viganò’s Istituto Marchiondi Spagliardi as a sequence of brutalist volumes immersed in the still semi-rural outskirts of Baggio; he follows the proto-modern curves of Muzio’s Ca’ Brutta; he transforms Moretti’s complex on Corso Italia into an almost abstract presence suspended between the ruins of wartime bombings and the city’s new business district. Many of the photographs still show empty lots, railway yards, urban margins and transforming peripheries. Today they look like archaeological images of Milan before Porta Nuova and CityLife.

Paolo Monti was never simply an architectural photographer. Born in 1908, after the war he moved to Venice to work as an industrial manager before eventually abandoning that world to devote himself entirely to photography. Monti experienced Italy’s economic boom firsthand, along with all its contradictions: the optimism of progress, but also the standardization and coldness of industrial modernity.

In Milan he worked for the Triennale exhibitions, for the studios of BBPR, Gio Ponti, Albini and Scarpa, as well as for publishers and museums. But above all, he developed a new photographic language. Silvia Paoli — photography historian and curator of Milan’s Civico Archivio Fotografico at Castello Sforzesco, the institution that collaborated on the volume — emphasizes this point throughout her essay: Monti was not a mere documentarian. For him, photography meant composition, mental construction and formal research. He photographed architecture while constantly moving through space, searching for multiple viewpoints and rejecting the traditional frontal architectural shot. His images engage with Bauhaus aesthetics, German New Objectivity, Antonioni’s cinema and the entire visual culture of postwar Europe.

“Milanese consciousness recognizes its colorless mood in grey,” writes Barbara Carnevali, Director of Studies in Philosophy and professor of Social Aesthetics at EHESS in Paris, who authored the volume’s second essay. It is perhaps the most accurate definition of the Milan photographed by Paolo Monti: a grey city not only in the tones of black and white, but also in the emotional atmosphere running through its images — distant, rational and silent. It is a city still carrying the traces of Fascism and postwar reconstruction, where modernism seems to inherit not only an aesthetic but also a disciplined and productive idea of urban space.

Monti’s photographs are populated by empty offices, stations, parking lots, modular façades, billboards and construction sites. The metropolis is no longer made solely of buildings, but of signs, infrastructures and images. This is why the book still feels so relevant today: because it tells the prehistory of contemporary Milan and reveals a version of modernity that is less polished, more ambiguous and profoundly material. “No one understood the visual logic of Milanese modernism better than Monti,” Carnevali writes again. And indeed, more than simply photographing Milan, Paolo Monti seems to have constructed the visual imagination of the city we still carry with us today.