Architecture

Colonne di Porta Nuova

Reale Group Headquartes

The "Colonne di Porta Nuova"  is a tower building with a strong symbolic and identity impact for the city of Milan. A landmark in the urban skyline and at the same time a belvedere of the city from above.
The project is located in a district that in the last ten years has seen a multiplication of the number of buildings of considerable height that have enriched the Milanese skyline with new signs and created, albeit belatedly, the "business center" proposed on several times since the 1950s. In this setting, the height of the building is not the only parameter to stand out or relate to the context; the architectural and construction choices play an important role in redesigning the image of the city.
The Porta Nuova district has introduced an element of novelty and discontinuity with the past, evident in the leap in scale of the new buildings compared to the historic city. The next step, which our project anticipates, is the recovery of the relationship with the city, understood as attention to the architectural and above all cultural context; a new interpretation of the famous Milanese style that we read in the works of Masters such as Ponti, Caccia Dominioni and Gardella.
The architectural choices of the project go in the direction of reinforcing the urban identity of the building in the sober character of the construction system exposed on the facade, in the balance between the vertical lines of the pillars and the horizontal bands of the floors from which the glass surface is set back.
The choice of materials is oriented towards contemporary surfaces and solutions, where the architectural elements give life to plays of shadow and light and are an alternative to reflective glass, typical of some facades in the area that reflect the surrounding buildings or the sky when you look at them from below.

The solution combines a markedly vertical volume - the tower building - with a low volume on the ground floor - the courtyard and the roof garden -, which occupies the perimeter of the lot.

The tower emerges from an open urban space, giving a character to the intervention and generating a new square.

Daytime view

Night view

Aerial view of the building

Functional schemes

The plan provides a decentralized and elongated core where stairs, lifts and services are grouped: in this way, the work space is completely free, and can assume countless internal configurations. Flexibility of use is the inspiring principle of the spaces, understood not only as the possibility of modifying the interiors, inserting or removing partitions, but above all parcelling the floors into different departments, offices and activities managed by one or more tenants.

The office spaces can be organized as open-spaces of limited dimensions: an alternative to classic closed offices, but without reaching the critical dimension that has highlighted the limits of this model.

The internal organization of the building provides, in addition to the public entrance space, a series of collective spaces on the ground floor: a conference room, some meeting rooms and a multipurpose open space overlooking the reception.

The construction technology involves the use of standardized formwork systems (self-assembling formworks for the walls and aluminum frame systems for the floors) in order to reduce execution times.

The systems have been designed on the basis of sustainability with a new attention to the sanitation of interiors.