- / Ibiza
As the 2025 edition closes, the fair’s founding curator Saša Bogojev reflects on four years of building a boutique art platform that resists aesthetic clichés and champions global relevance
ISSUE NO. 31
Milan is a bourgeois city that has never accepted snobbery built on privilege or even aristocratic heritage: Milan’s snobbery is based on admiration for an intellectual and pragmatic superiority to which there is a desire to belong. The post-war architectural aesthetic, emerging from the rubble left by bombings and the original layout designed by fascists, presents itself as a matrix. An aesthetic seeking a minimal and immediate sign, aiming to distance itself from decorum, frills, niceties, and gossip. An aesthetic that amplifies the self-assurance inherent in every professional architect, nourished by modernity and progress.
Fascism was overthrown, as was the delusion of imperial Italy – mythologies were swept away like dust from a table. The proletarian Russian communist aesthetic persisted and fascinated those who declared themselves in the struggle for freedom. No sympathy for those Americans who had gained that freedom. It was the era of economic boom. Those who felt comfortable relied on wealth that had survived the war unscathed or had formed by responding to war needs. A wealth that turned into a profitable, consistent, and persistent business. Those who felt comfortable wanted their own house.
Permanent damage or outdated systems, uneasy memories or ghosts in the rooms – there was little interest in those dilapidated 19th-century buildings with window cornices and portals. A new modern house in Milan was the dream of the wealthy offspring. The young and the rich dreamed of glass and reinforced concrete buildings; culture and aesthetics were dictated by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright – even fashion was influenced by these architectural masters.
Children seemed to be rude to their parents: how was it possible? Frescoed living rooms, neoclassical canvases, colonnades, and stone stairs – the new generation preferred pillars, transparent walls, steel planes, and rough slabs. Milan’s identity was formed: it met international brutalism, which Ricardo Bofill would soon develop in France and Mexico, while simultaneously liquidating Portaluppi and Gio Ponti’s decorative expressions. It included Mies van der Rohe’s American minimalism.
In the 1960s, Milan maintained humility and respect in the face of such striking visual expressions. It was as if Milan knew how to repeat itself: great masters, great exaggerations, but here we keep our feet on the ground, we do things that make sense.
It was never about belittling creative effort; it was never about a sense of inferiority or provincialism: it was about precision. The world’s greatest spectacle in architecture has been transformed into a good quality of life in Milan. More than anything, in Milan, the beauty of a design became an intellectual matter well before a cultural form (always remember the difference between intellectual and cultural). Even literature transformed into a commercial industry – Milan took the title of publishing capital.
As often happens, it’s easier to say what Milan is not. Milan is not decor. Milan is not a brocade or embroidered fabric. Milan is not a floral exaggeration. Milan is not friendly. Milan is not the backdrop for ridiculous videos in front of a cappuccino after eleven. Milan is not chatter. Milan is not a feast – as Paris might have been according to Hemingway. Milan is not a place for frivolous people. Milan is not beautiful but not ugly. Milan is a stern lady who reads too many books and always has a ready answer.
To understand Milan, one must also observe how different Milan was from Turin, a monarchical city. Gianni Agnelli still represents the epitome of what a Milanese man cannot and must not be. Agnelli was not a patron of contemporary architecture of those times – he preferred salons decorated by Mongiardino, as if he wanted to deceive himself into living in Versailles’ rococo with its ancien régime mummies. Agnelli’s story remains a pleasant costume phenomenon, certainly when he appears in Arbasino’s pages – Arbasino’s muse, Domietta Del Drago, was Gianni Agnelli’s lover.
Italo-English neologisms, such as skiare, wanted to seem like distractions, but instead were clear demonstrations of class superiority. Agnelli undermined the young Italian Republic with layoffs: he wanted to limit the development of an Italian railway network so he could sell more cars. If the Italian railway network was slow in its development, it was the Agnelli family’s fault.
The Agnellis built Sestriere, a ski resort in the Alps, for their workers: popular buildings that still today cry out for the lack of trees in a desolate valley between coal-covered mountains with snow – while Agnelli stayed in St Moritz, Gstaad, and Courchevel, where he avoided meeting his workers.
Unlike Turin, Milan appeared as a bourgeois and pragmatic city. Cleanliness and geometry reminded of the functionality and efficiency of the factory. Industrial architecture was the matrix of aesthetic code, but also of a popular building.
The industrialist provided a salary to the worker and felt responsible for the entire family of his worker: schools and summer camps for the children, discounted markets for the wives, hospitals. The industrialist was the father and master; the entire life of his employee depended on him, not just their bank account. The owner’s ethics are continuously updated – but the meaning remains the same: the successful Milanese entrepreneur wanted luxury without flaunting it – because the next morning in the factory, he wanted to stand by his workers.
Let’s try to define Milan and its architectural and aesthetic identity: an identity conceived by Piermarini’s Neoclassicism and produced in the noble and popular residential buildings of the nineteenth century. That late eighteenth-century Neoclassicism would be revisited more than a century later by the fascist era, recovering Roman matrices: mixing them with Art Deco electricity and giving rise to monumental architecture: the Central Station. With the arrival of post-war rationalism and the economic boom, Milan’s identity encountered a new vigor from the masters of the 1950s and 1960s.
La Forma dell’Utile, The Form of the Useful is the title of the 1951 Triennale exhibition, set up and curated by the BBPR studio. The Velasca Tower was built in 1958, for which BBPR is remembered. That same year, the office building for the ex-Chase Manhattan Bank in Piazza Meda was constructed – a less striking project than the Tower and therefore more explanatory of the Milanese identity I am trying to decode.
The ex-bank designed by BBPR presents an iron and steel colonnade placed on a curve. This colonnade connects and links via Hoepli – with the bookstore designed by Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini (1958) – to the apse of the church of San Fedele (San Fedele is Alessandro Manzoni’s church: Manzoni fell from its steps in 1873, leading to the decline of his last months).
In the center of this Piazza Meda, the Sun, the large disc by Arnaldo Pomodoro, stands among some planted magnolias. Two buildings from the 1930s face each other: the Banca Popolare by Giovanni Greppi and Palazzo Bolchini by Pier Giulio Magistretti – architectures that exemplify how Neoclassicism evolved into Art Deco. A glimpse of the San Babila Tower, also known as the Rubanuvole, appears at the end of Corso Matteotti at the corner of Palazzo Crespi.
The Rubanuvole rises at the meeting point of Via Montenapoleone, and Via Bagutta. The construction of the tower took two years, from 1935 to 1937 – the nickname, Rubanuvole, which means Cloud Thief, was invented by journalists who saw it as Milan’s first skyscraper.
The project was signed by a Jewish architect, Alessandro Rimini – whose name was later obscured by the racial laws of 1938. He continued to work until his liberation, in the meantime asking others for the favor of lending their name.
In 1944, Alessandro Rimini was taken to prison in San Vittore, where he was beaten and tortured. He was loaded onto a train for Auschwitz. He managed to escape and hide, to save himself. Today, Milan’s center is marked by his touch – from the Traversi Garage to Palazzo Donini, one could say that the Piazza San Babila we see today was set up by him. Rimini designed many cinemas on Corso Vittorio Emanuele, as was the bar delle Tre Gazzelle. How much more is there in the city – but few remember it.
Alessandro Rimini wrote nothing about his work – deliberately, as he did not want literature or noise around what he left behind. He believed his buildings would serve well, both for those who lived in them and for his legacy. For the former, it’s safe to say the purpose was honored; for the latter, his memory, perhaps less so.
This is a story of resilience, courage, and survival. A dignity and culture of doing more and saying less, a sobriety indifferent to fame and recognition, resistant to the tedium of vanity. Alessandro Rimini might be seen as a central figure in defining what could be Milan’s architectural identity today.
Consider the names Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Ignazio Gardella, Jan Andrea Battistoni, Angelo Mangiarotti, and Bruno Morassutti, each a part of Milan’s architectural heritage. Several buildings in Milan exemplify this aesthetic of intellectual rigor: Luigi Caccia Dominioni’s building at 18 Piazza Sant’Ambrogio, reconstructed in 1947 on the bombed foundations of Alberico Barbiano Belgiojoso, with stone outlines, a red cement facade, and a subtle pattern of galleries and windows up to the attic balcony.
Casa Tognella by Ignazio Gardella, near Parco Sempione and completed in 1954, presents a design that almost seems more like a blueprint than a building. Then there’s 1 Piazza Montebello, where Carla Fracci once lived on the first floor, a 1968 project by Jan Andrea Battistoni. Similarly, BBPR’s work on Via Cavalieri del Santo Sepolcro transformed the restored facade and brought a rear-residential design to the forefront of innovation, with windows and balconies cloaked in climbing plants.
Compare this to the tower on Via Quadronno, designed in 1962 by Angelo Mangiarotti and Bruno Morassutti, both structures covered in cascading leaves and plants – designs that may have paved the way for Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale. Boeri’s work, more emblematic than architectural, stands as a symbol of the Milan of today.
As early as tomorrow, Milan’s architecture must anticipate greenery – on the streets, roofs, and facades, evolving towards a vision of Milan as a garden city. Returning to Piazza San Babila, the heart of the city, which recently endured a regeneration project leaving many to decry it as a lifeless expanse of stone and heat. Yet in Piazza San Babila, looking skyward is inevitable: one notices the remnants above Palazzo Donini, another creation of Rimini, though soon to be removed. Across from the Rubanuvole, a tower, is the former attic of Maurizio Gucci, reputed to be among the most stunning residences worldwide, featuring a hanging garden that, even in disrepair, still supports tall olive trees and oaks.
Milan’s identity, reaching toward the future, seems to grow along the branches of an oak: rugged, clean, sincere, and intellectual – ever distanced from the damask frills of curtains and wallpapers, observed with a discerning, healthy detachment.
Alessandro Rimini wrote nothing about his work – deliberately, he did not want there to be literature and noise around what he left behind. He believed that his buildings would have done a good job, for those who would live and dwell in them, and also for his memory. For the former, it can be said that yes, the task was respected – for the latter, his memory, less so.
Story, courage, and survival. This dignity, this culture of doing a lot and talking little, this sobriety and indifference to celebrity and recognition; the boredom of vanity and self-congratulation. Alessandro Rimini could be considered one of the primary builders of what today should be the identity of Milan.
Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Ignazio Gardella, Jan Andrea Battistoni, Angelo Mangiarotti, and Bruno Morassutti. We cite some of Milan’s buildings that can serve as examples of this intellectual aesthetic: the building at 18 Piazza Sant’Ambrogio, which Luigi Caccia Dominioni rebuilt after the bombings in 1947 on the foundations of Alberico Barbiano Belgiojoso: the stone side lines, the red cement facade, the alternation of galleries, and the subtleties of the windows on the second and third floors, up to the balcony of the attic.
Casa Tognella, the house at Parco Sempione that Ignazio Gardella finished building in 1954: the rigor of a design that still seems on paper, rather than three-dimensional – or the building at 1 Piazza Montebello, where Carla Fracci lived on the first floor: a design by Jan Andrea Battistoni from 1968. Again with BBPR in Via Cavalieri del Santo Sepolcro, a construction site that remained active throughout the Sixties, leaving the facade restored and bringing the rear-residential to the avant-garde: the windows and balconies are wrapped in branches of trees and climbing plants. Here, the comparison with the tower on Via Quadronno, designed by Angelo Mangiarotti and Bruno Morassutti in 1962, is worth mentioning. Both these houses are enveloped in plants and cascading leaves. Both are works that may have legitimized Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale, whose innovation – which is prioritized over its architecture – defines it as a symbol of today’s Milan.
From tomorrow, if not already yesterday, Milan’s architecture must foresee trees. On the streets, on the roofs, or on the facades, this city evolves into the utopia of a Milan garden city. We return to Piazza San Babila, the pulsating center that has just undergone the offense of a regeneration for which, unfortunately, many of us have cried shame: a stretch of stone, heat, and bewilderment that remains incomprehensible.
When walking through Piazza San Babila, there is nothing left but to lift your eyes to the sky: in doing so you will notice the signs beyond the cornice of Palazzo Donini by our Rimini. They will soon be permanently removed. Always eyes upward, on the opposite side of the Rubanuvole, there is the attic that once belonged to Maurizio Gucci. It is said to be one of the most beautiful houses in the world, not just in Milan – because of the hanging garden that still persists after years of semi-abandonment. Olive trees, holm oaks, and other full-height trunks can be recognized.
Milan’s identity is projected into the future running along the branches of an oak tree, rough, clean, sincere, and intellectual – always far from the damask flourish of a curtain or wallpaper, observed with denial and healthy snobbery.
ISSUE NO. 31
Lampoon is a cultural magazine.
Culture today means sustainability – in its honest meaning.
Culture has always been about human respect, tolerance. It’s not only about accepting human diversity but it’s about searching for the beauty of every human peculiarity.
Inclusion is the first value that defines art. Culture today means one thing only: to be part of a community, to think as a community.
Reading Lampoon, you see that these themes are smoothly aligned. A good part of the articles’ content discusses practices to restore our environment and stories about understanding the others.
Reading Lampoon, you find a dialogue between science and creativity. From sharp and edgy photo sessions to fashion, architecture, technology – the commitment is dedicated to a future that is all about us – together.
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