1. Mass Housing Without a Master Plan
Milan was heavily damaged by bombings during World War II. With around one third of the city’s buildings destroyed, a large part of its population was forced to live for years in barracks after losing their homes.1 In order to satisfy the sharp housing demand in the postwar years, the national government facilitated the development of the country’s real estate industry. Twenty-five years after the end of the war, more than 70 percent of Milan’s urban fabric was new.
Milan’s postwar mass housing development differed from other European cities in two primary ways: first, the majority of the buildings were erected by private individuals; and second, new constructions were largely located within pre-existing contexts.2 The result was a “halfway modernism,” in which radical visions of a modern city circulating at the time among the architects around the world clashed with the rationalities of small-scale real estate operations, while being grounded in the local building and living culture. The design of these buildings can therefore be understood as the result of balancing the competing interests of multiple stakeholders.
Though implemented individually by developers without a prescriptive master plan, these interventions converged into repetitive architectural patterns. This was due to three key factors: the uniformity of Milan’s street grid, with similar plots on a flat terrain and unchanged late-nineteenth-century building regulations; a vibrant professional scene that spread ideas and techniques among numerous parallel development processes; and the emergence of a shared aspiration for a middle-class lifestyle, forged between political projects, developers’ marketing narratives, and Milanese domestic traditions. As a result, distinct architectural elements that are ubiquitous in the city today—like colorful tiled facades, pitched roofs on high-rise blocks, lush street-front gardens hosting entrances to the condominiums, mosaic-clad fountains, filigree canopies, and curved pathways—embodied the diverse aspirations, rationales, and strategies of the various actors involved in the city’s reconstruction.
2. Housing Boom and Middle-Class Aspirations
The postwar Milanese housing boom was propelled by a political project that aimed to cultivate a stable middle class, which was perceived as both a bulwark against authoritarianism and a stable voting base for moderate parties. As elsewhere in Europe, this vision of the nuclear family as society’s cornerstone was advanced not only through mass media but through policies: tax incentives and subsidized loans for housing construction. Yet unlike much of Europe, where car-centric suburbanization promoting the single-family house model took hold, Italy’s postwar ideal centered on urban living. “Living together, living in the city” was a collective aspiration that drove Italy’s high-density urbanism, with the condominium as its defining social and spatial unit.3
The postwar wave of condominium construction took place in voids within Milan’s tightly-drawn parcellation grid, and following formal principles derived from Haussmann’s Paris.4 These gaps existed not just because of the bombings, which destroyed around one third of all buildings, but also due to government programs moving industry outside of the city and the demolition of obsolete buildings within the city center. The simultaneous development of all these lots turned the city into one big construction site, where new ideals of modern living with new domestic standards of hygiene and comfort were adapted to the repetitive morphologies of plots within dense urban blocks, Milanese traditions of living and building, and available materials and techniques.5 Postwar Milan was an experimental laboratory where ideas were discussed, translated, exchanged, and cast in concrete.
Piano AR, 1948.
3. From Radical Visions to Ritualized Compromises
Amidst postwar enthusiasm for rebuilding a better world, a debate on reconstruction unfolded across Italy that focused on the aims, limits, and regulatory tools of urban planning and architecture. Milan was at the forefront of this debate, with its vibrant architectural scene working to realize new architectural ideas imported through media conferences like CIAM. Housing construction was the main theme, with notions like “Casa ideale” (Ideal House) “La casa dell’uomo,” (The House of Man) and “Una casa per tutti” (A House for All) being proposed in various architecture manifestos and exhibitions, embodying the hopes and aspirations of the architectural profession and wider society alike.6
The plan for the reconstruction of Milan was subject to an open competition in 1945. The most noted proposal, which was elaborated by key architectural figures in Milan, Piano AR (Architetti Riuniti), envisioned an open-plan high-rise development floating in a continuous park. This proposal laid the foundation for a new regulatory plan, which was developed by Piero Bottoni in collaboration with the city administration and other forward-thinking architects.7 However, in 1949, the regulatory plan had yet to be finished when the Communist Party lost power in the municipal government. Under the new Christian Democrat administration, a new head of the urban design department was appointed, and the direction of the work completely changed. From that point on, the municipal government returned in many ways to the regulatory regime that had governed Milanese development from 1889: small-scale real estate speculation as the primary means of urban expansion, housing provision, and capital investment.
The new regulatory plan for Milan was not approved until 1953. One of the key features of this plan was a general reduction of building density compared to the pre-existing 1934 Albertini plan, which was based on the perimeter block model. This triggered a rush of development applications before the new plan took hold, fueling speculation. During this time, the absence of legislation and regulatory confusion required case-by-case negotiations, also known as “rito ambrosiano,” which were conducted largely based on yet-to-be-written principles for new city development.8 This allowed, for example, the wider public debate that was taking place at the time about the lack of public green spaces in Milan to be used as an argument by developers to get extra building area from the city administration in exchange for creating new green areas in the city, like street-front gardens.
The approval process for the Giardini Moscova complex exemplifies this dynamic. In 1948, the city administration—represented by Amos Edallo, co-author of the new regulatory plan that was developed under the Communist municipal government—nearly approved a project with towers violating building height limits, swayed by the developer’s proposal for a densely vegetated passage evoking “towers in the park.”9 Yet in 1949, the reconstruction plan was approved and mandated private green areas, forcing the developer to convert the public passage into a closed courtyard and reduce building volumes.10 The result was a hybrid: seven towers whose street-facing volumes stand directly adjacent to neighboring buildings enclosing a courtyard-like green space that faintly echoed Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (1930) at micro-scale. Bound by persistent regulations and development logics, this scheme absorbed modernist gestures into Milan’s existing fabric. It rendered radical ideals as moderate inflections rather than clean breaks, contributing to a phenomenon of urban continuity.11
4. The 1953 Plan: From Debates to Implementation
After a long process of changes and approvals, the new regulatory plan (Piano Regolatore Generale) came into force in 1953 and shaped construction in Milan until 1970. During that time, the city used a set of documents to guide urban development from the territorial to the local scale. The plan divided the city in three concentric zones: an external belt of land reserved for agriculture; a middle belt where expansion could take place according to functional zoning and a maximum density index (the ratio of buildable volume to plot area); and a central zone that was subject only to building regulations—the “Regolamento Edilizio”—and, if there was one, the “detailed plan” (“Piano Particolareggiato”) for the site.
The 1953 General Plan’s building regulations were largely unchanged from earlier plans, which regulated building volumes through two primary criteria: obligatory street front alignment and the ratio of facade height to the width of the open space in front of the building. 12 Crucially, however, it allowed setbacks, which meant that by stepping a building back from the street, developers could gain extra height (and thus volume). In Milan’s narrow center, this exception was widely exploited not only to increase density, but also to enhance sunlight exposure within apartments. Architecturally, this effectively externalized the traditional courtyard, converting it into a street-front element.13
Corso Buenos Aires, 1910. A typical Berutian streetscape.
In defining buildings by their street-front appearance, the 1953 building regulations largely preserved the character of those originally formulated in 1889, together with the first city master plan by Cesare Beruto. Looking at Haussmann’s Paris, Beruto proposed a scheme of city growth based on a network of streets and squares that would be gradually filled by real estate developers and had to respect width-to-height proportions of the street based on the sun angle.14 This not only ensured basic hygienic conditions, but also created a continuous cornice line and a uniform character of street-front buildings. These regulations from 1889 were, in a sense, a continuation of the first attempt to control the image of public space in Milan through the regulation of building facades, which was developed under Napoleonic rule in 1807 by Commissione d’Ornato and propagated the notion of civic beauty through collective discipline over individual expression.15
These nineteenth-century ideals were preserved in the Christian Democrats’ 1953 building regulations. The setback provision, though offering flexibility, was tightly controlled through rules harmonizing street-front articulation: setback volumes had to remain parallel to the street, with all exposed facades requiring windows or decorative treatment, while newly created open spaces had to be “decorously arranged,” meaning at least three-fifths of the non-built area had to be landscaped. These constraints inadvertently allowed controlled ruptures in the urban fabric and institutionalized the street-front garden typology. Before the war, technical limitations such as construction methods and elevator technology had restricted the widespread adoption of setbacks. During reconstruction, however, this approach aligned municipal and social aesthetic ideals with developers’ economic interests.
Via Nievo Gramigna, ED, Caccia Dominioni. G., Mazza, S., Milano. Un secolo di architettura milanese dal Cordusio alla Bicocca (Hoepli, Milano, 2001).
5. Dealing with Regulations: Architects and Clients
The Milanese industrial bourgeoisie, which had guided the city’s physical and economic development through two decades of fascist rule by adapting to the regime’s structures, emerged largely unscathed from the postwar purges that removed fascist collaborators from public office and official institutions. As a result, they maintained their central role in the postwar reconstruction of the city by taking over the real estate market.16 The close relationship between professional architectural culture and the industrial bourgeoisie ruling class was a defining feature of postwar architecture in Milan. One the one hand, as Gio Ponti writes, this was an important condition for high-quality architectural production. But on the other, it was responsible for the failure of the new city development to integrate the lower classes.17 The Milanese industrial bourgeoisie invested its capital in real estate, building apartments for themselves and for their relatives and friends. In this context, condominiums’ street-front, public-facing elements had an important role in representing the social status of its residents. A building’s facade and front garden was a status symbol, and was designed accordingly. Indeed, these elements were meant to be contemplated visually, but not actually used. The use of street-front gardens, for instance, was usually prohibited by condominium regulations.
This cultural understanding of the street-front garden was shared between the clients and the designers. Leading figures in the postwar Milanese architectural scene were usually themselves direct descendants from bourgeois families.18 In this social context, architects were often working in a circle of families and friends of the same status, who were personally commissioning them to design housing. But architects were not only involved in projects for bourgeois families; they also worked on larger commissions for professional developers, which transferred techniques and architectural elements from small-scale upper-class housing to large-scale middle-class developments, disseminating compositions, elements, language, and technology across the city.
Luigi Caccia Dominioni’s work exemplifies the diffuse, often collaborative processes that shaped Milan’s postwar building culture. His early projects, like his family house (1947–49) and later bourgeois commissions (Via Nievo, 1955–57; Corso Italia, 1957–64), developed a distinctive architectural language. His exceptional sensitivity for facade composition and materiality and a fluid character of plans that interwove the inside and the outside and staged the garden as a part of the building’s public presence were applied on a larger scale in Via Baldissera; a housing ensemble designed for Società Generale Immobiliare, then one of the largest real estate developers on the market.19 Furthermore, for developer Toro in Milan's western periphery (Lorenteggio), Dominioni collaborated with engineer Vittore Ceretti on a project in which he designed only the volumetric scheme and facades while Ceretti executed the rest. And in another Toro development, Ceretti worked independently while reinterpreting Dominioni’s characteristic facade elements.20
These were not isolated cases. Architectural ideas circulated in the professional scene through journals like Casabella, Domus, Ottagono, and Abitare, through monographs, and through the cross-pollination of people in projects across the city. Filigree canopies, reflective ceramic tiles, curved garden paths paved with natural stone, and intricate solutions embedding underground parking into the gardens circulated between projects, blurring the authorship of the city’s reconstruction. Scholar Maria Capitanucci termed this ecosystem “professionismo colto,” a culture where architects, engineers, and developers engaged in a continuous process of exchange.21 Dominioni’s work, then, was one node in a network where formal innovation migrated unpredictably, from elite commissions to periphery housing and back again.
6. Negotiating Urban Renewal
Milan’s postwar reconstruction reveals fundamental insights into urban transformation at scale. The street-front garden phenomenon—an accidental yet ubiquitous typology—demonstrates both the fragility of radical visions against complex stakeholder negotiations and the latent power of simple building codes when leveraged by skilled professionals and amplified through media, publications, and networks. This underscores how shared systems outweigh individual authorship: how the architect’s singular vision dissolves into the collective processes of dissemination, regulation, and compromise. It suggests a paradigm shift for planners, designers, and architects, from pursuing exceptional singular concepts as a possible mechanism impacting large development processes to engaging with the mundane mechanisms that shape cities: building codes, knowledge networks, and shared techniques. In Milan, the interests that converged were driven by the pursuit of profit and were limited in their social vision. Yet the lessons of their mechanisms and their results remain vital. Here lies a recovered agency for architects—not in heroic gestures, but in mastering the common frameworks that structure urban systems.
Giuseppe Campos Venuti, Antonello Boatti, Annapaola Canevari et al., Un secolo di urbanistica a Milano {A century of urban planning in Milan} (Milan: Clup, 1986).
Nicole De Togni, Milano negoziata: narrazioni dopo il 1953 {A century of urban planning in negotiated Milan: narratives after 1953}(Milan: Franco Angeli, 2022), 17–36.
Bruno Bonomo, Filippo De Pieri, Gaia Caramellino et al., Storie di case: Abitare l’Italia del boom {Housing Stories: Living in Boom Italy} (Rome: Donzelli, 2015).
Venuti, Boatti, Canevari et al., Un secolo di urbanistica a Milano.
Angelo Lunati, Ideas of Ambiente: History and Bourgeois Ethic in the Construction of Modern Milan, 1881–1969 (Zurich: Park Books, 2021).
Ernesto Nathan Rogers, “Casa reale e casa ideale,” Domus 209 (1946): 2; The subtitle of Domus magazine during the editorial of E.N. Rogers from January 1946 until December 1947; the title of the VIII Triennale di Milano held in 1947 and directed by Piero Bottoni, where a new model neighborhood, QT8, which interpreted the modernist concept of open development spread in the greenery was presented; Luigi Einaudi, “A favore della proprietà della casa,” in La Casa In Italia 1945-1980, eds. G. Rochat, G Sateriale, and L. Spano (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1980).
L. Barbiano di Belgiojoso, “Presentazione,” Urbanistica 15–16 (1955): 196–97.
Antonello Boatti, “Il piano regolatore del 1953 e la sua attuazione: dall’utopia del Piano AR agli anni della speculazione,” {The 1953 Master Plan and its Implementation: From the Utopia of the AR Plan to the Years of Speculation} in Venuti, Boatti, Canevari et al., Un secolo di urbanistica a Milano.
Federico Zanfi, “Convenzione urbanistiche e il nuovo paesaggio residenziale per i ceti medi a Milano tra gli anni ‘50 e ’70,” {Urban Planning Conventions and the New Residential Landscape for the Middle Classes in Milan Between the 1950s and 1970s} Territorio no. 64, April 2013.
The Reconstruction Plan was introduced in Italy as a special urban planning instrument by Legislative Decree No. 154 of March 1, 1945. The Reconstruction Plan for Milan was approved on February 28, 1949 and applied exclusively to the new construction of buildings in the bombed or heavily damaged areas of the city. Although it formally had the legal status of a Piano Particolareggiato (Detailed Plan), in practice it functioned as a general urban framework, primarily defining street alignments and functional zoning. More detailed planivolumetrici (plan-volumetric) schemes were subsequently developed at a 1:500 scale, but only for specific sectors of the city. See Urbanistica no. 18–19, March 1956.
Giulio Bettini, Die “città animata”: Mailand und die Architektur von Asnago Vender {The “città animata”: Milan and the Architecture of Asnago Vender} (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2016); Elli Mosayebi, “Konstruktionen von Ambiente. Wohnungsbau von Luigi Caccia Dominioni in Mailand, 1945-1970” {Constructions of Ambience: Housing Construction by Luigi Caccia Dominioni in Milan, 1945-1970} (Doctoral thesis, ETH Zurich, 2014).
“Regolamento Edilizio del Comune di Milano,” {Building Regulations for the City of Milan} Comune di Milano, Capitolo VII, Art. 64, 1953, 20.
This innovation wasn't from the postwar era; Giovanni Muzio's seminal 1935 Via Ampère project had already demonstrated the approach. Its subsequent feature in Domus magazine framed these street-front gardens—with their abundant light and vegetation—as a progressive typological alternative to the conventional enclosed courtyard prescribed by standard case building codes. See G. Ponti, “Una casa interessante a Milano,” {An Interesting House in Milan} Domus no. 110, 1937.
Andrea Casiraghi, “Zur Mailänder Stadtenwicklung,” {Milan's Urban Development} in Milano – Architetture, Mailand – die Bauten, Beiträge zur Vorlesung Architektur VIII, {Milan - Architeture, Milan - the buildings, Contributions to the Architecture lecture VIII} ed. Flora Ruchat-Roncati Zurich: gta Verlag, 1998): 165–78.
Corinna Morandi, Milano: La grande trasformazione urbana {The Great Urban Transformation} (Venice: Marsilio, 2005.)
Lunati, Ideas of Ambiente.
Fulvio Irace, Milano Moderna: Architettura e città nell’epoca della ricostruzione {Modern Milan: Architecture and the City in the Era of Reconstruction} (Milan: Motta Editore, 1996).
Maria Vittoria Capitanucci, Il professionismo colto nel dopoguerra, FOAM-Itinerari di Architettura Milanese {Educated Professionalism in the Postwar Period, FOAM-Itineraries of Milanese Architecture} (Milan: Solferino edizioni, 2015).
“Realizzazioni e studi nel settore edilizio,” {Accomplishments and Studies in the Construction Industry} Società Generale Immobiliare, Officina Poligrafica Laziale, Roma, 1962.
Bonomo, De Pieri, Caramellino et al., Storie di case.
Capitanucci, Il professionismo colto nel dopoguerra.
