Description
The Torre Velasca is the "mushroom" skyscraper near Piazza Missori, in the center of Milan: a concrete tower whose upper part is wider than the rest, with oblique beams in view. The Milanese call it the "skyscraper with suspenders."
"An absolute masterpiece," for Philippe Daverio. "The paradigm of the civilization of horror," for Vittorio Sgarbi. Few buildings have divided Milan like this one.
The suspenders are the oblique beams that, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth floor, hold up the overhanging upper part of the tower. They are the design of the engineer Arturo Danusso: twenty oblique trusses that support the residential floors, up high.
The studio BBPR wanted a symbol of rebirth, on an area devastated by wartime bombs. And it also wanted to quote the medieval Lombard towers, such as the Torre del Filarete at the Castello Sforzesco.
At first they thought of steel and glass, as in New York. An American company warned that Italian industry could not manage it, and reinforced concrete with a stone cladding was chosen. The construction took 292 days, eight fewer than planned.
Worth a close look: the facades are prefabricated panels of concrete and pink porphyry grit, with windows laid out irregularly. The critic Paolo Portoghesi called them "spettinature" (tousled hair).
Offices and shops below, homes above: Gino Bramieri lived for a long time in a penthouse with a view of the Duomo. The writer Luciano Bianciardi dismissed it as a "big glass-and-concrete lump of a tower."
The front is almost the same on every side, marked by the ribs of the structure. In 1961 the tower received the prize of the Istituto Nazionale di Architettura and, since 2011, it has been a protected building under the Soprintendenza.
The name comes from the square, which recalls Juan Fernández de Velasco, Spanish governor of the Duchy of Milan in the seventeenth century. The tower rises for 28 floors, two of them underground, and inside it has offices, shops and homes.
"An absolute masterpiece," for Philippe Daverio. "The paradigm of the civilization of horror," for Vittorio Sgarbi. Few buildings have divided Milan like this one.
The suspenders are the oblique beams that, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth floor, hold up the overhanging upper part of the tower. They are the design of the engineer Arturo Danusso: twenty oblique trusses that support the residential floors, up high.
The studio BBPR wanted a symbol of rebirth, on an area devastated by wartime bombs. And it also wanted to quote the medieval Lombard towers, such as the Torre del Filarete at the Castello Sforzesco.
At first they thought of steel and glass, as in New York. An American company warned that Italian industry could not manage it, and reinforced concrete with a stone cladding was chosen. The construction took 292 days, eight fewer than planned.
Worth a close look: the facades are prefabricated panels of concrete and pink porphyry grit, with windows laid out irregularly. The critic Paolo Portoghesi called them "spettinature" (tousled hair).
Offices and shops below, homes above: Gino Bramieri lived for a long time in a penthouse with a view of the Duomo. The writer Luciano Bianciardi dismissed it as a "big glass-and-concrete lump of a tower."
The front is almost the same on every side, marked by the ribs of the structure. In 1961 the tower received the prize of the Istituto Nazionale di Architettura and, since 2011, it has been a protected building under the Soprintendenza.
The name comes from the square, which recalls Juan Fernández de Velasco, Spanish governor of the Duchy of Milan in the seventeenth century. The tower rises for 28 floors, two of them underground, and inside it has offices, shops and homes.