A Critique on Milanese Architectural Attitudes to Heritage, Monumentality, and Preservation through Notions of Pentimento, Non Finito & Conservation

At the intersection of memories and the past itself are the designed histories of monuments. They stand as dialogues between collective memories and the physicality of cities. Like history itself, they are storytellers narrating the past onto the present, combining story with fact. A monument therefore is an architectural embodiment of this dialogue in physical stones and mortar. There is a dichotomy of the past between history and living memories that temporally occupy approximately 60-80 years. Milan has living memories not fully expressed to the city.

Given unstable monumentality, the proposal uses concepts of pentimento, non finito & conservation to trace layers of memory of two urban artefacts. The Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM) is an 18th century neoclassical palace displaying traditional art, whilst the PAC is a twice-reconstructed modernist art gallery that is effectively a 1990s building guising as a post-war 50s building. It is a pathological monument that has covered up its past.

Therefore, the proposal forcefully intervenes on the PAC by expressing scars from the Via Palestro Massacre through combined expressions of new materiality that embody present memories, contrasting to age-value weathered materiality of the existing conditions. Like a canvas, the pentimento methodology works in layers, with the existing acting as the background to the foreground of the new additions. A new propelling monument to the 21st century artistic culture is the Museo del Venticento (museum of twenty-hundreds) which architecturally expresses non finito to the incomplete 21st century. This takes on the aesthetic of the Ruin, in which vast, monumental, abstracted spaces, and materiality cater to contemporary art exhibitions internally and externally, distinguishing itself from the GAM & PAC. The GAM’s conserved approach critically questions notions of preservation, as every act of conservation is itself a new work. Thus, pentimento and conservation blend, in which the GAM’s architectural expression is affected both by the interventions of the PAC and the living memories of Milan. The non finito stimulates future additions to the trio of the PAC, GAM & Venticento, incurring future pentimento that will continually embody living memories that will eventually die out to history through aging and weathering.

The triumvirate of the proposals are engaged in a Hegelian dialectic which synthesise in a combined-work with the purpose of exhibiting art continually from the neoclassical era to the contemporary, whilst also having the wider purposefulness of manifesting the living identity of Milan through its Memory Gallery, Memory Chapel (ambient atmospheric spaces contrasting to adjacent light-filled art galleries) and the Memory Towers which memorialise the five victims of the Mafia attack. Hence, the proposal authentically reveals collective living identities, making history visible, and showcasing Milan’s art to the world.