“Paris and Barcelona have sharply curbed cars, but Milan has yet to follow,” Pestellini Laparelli said. The city sits in the industrial Po Valley, in a basin that traps pollution. “Everyone blames Milan’s geography, but when Covid halted traffic, the air improved immediately,” he added. “The city’s geography is all the more reason to get cars off the road.”
The crowded mayoral race has as many as 20 possible candidates, “yet only two candidates have mentioned bike lanes,” he said. As a positive development, he pointed to the protected bike lane on Corso Buenos Aires — formerly known to me as “death trap street” when I would cycle amid its avalanche of traffic — but noted that the city took years to complete the one-mile project. Milan’s Climate City Contract outlines 150 projects aimed at climate neutrality by 2030, including cleaner energy, sustainable mobility and greener, more permeable streets. Their impact will hinge on implementation.
“Forestami is another essential development,” Pestellini Laparelli said, “but it will yield results in 10 years.” For the time being he is redesigning Base, an industrial complex turned cultural center, as a “climate refuge” — where plants, shade canopies and misting fans will create a public oasis. “We need immediate as well as long-term projects to deal with climate change,” he said.
In the garden of the Fondazione Luigi Rovati, I met Mario Cucinella, the museum’s architect, to talk about building for a warming climate. His largest project in Milan, the 23-story Unipol Tower at Porta Nuova, deploys an elliptical form, a mostly opaque double-skin facade and an atrium to buffer temperature fluctuations and reduce energy consumption.
Some argue that less carbon is generated when architects adapt existing structures instead of building new ones. But Cucinella noted that Milan’s building boom is bound to continue, fueled by wealthy European transplants drawn by Italy’s flat tax on foreign income. Though construction is one of the most polluting industries, Cucinella uses recycled materials and advances energy-conserving designs. He has also pioneered a new lower-emissions building method for small dwellings, called NeVA, which uses an enormous 3-D printer to extrude a composite of earth and local-stone concrete.
Cucinella counters the self-defeating call for more air-conditioning — which guzzles energy and expels hot air — with ancestral climate-control techniques. “In Italy, we had so many building methods to keep a house temperate,” he said. “We just forgot them as we became dependent on air-conditioning.”