The International Congress of Modern Architecture at Otterlo in 1959 is one of the most revealing moments in the history of the Modern Movement. Ernesto Rogers — one of BBPR's partners — presents the just-completed Torre Velasca. The response of the international architects present — including Alison and Peter Smithson, Jaap Bakema, Aldo van Eyck — is open hostility. The tower is accused of historicism, of regionalism, of betraying the principles of the Modern Movement. Some dismiss it as a medieval tower. Rogers replies: yes, it is — or rather, it converses with them. The tower is not historicism: it is a response to the Milanese context.
The BBPR studio — Gian Luigi Banfi (who died at Mauthausen in 1945), Lodovico Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti, Ernesto Nathan Rogers — is the studio that most fully represents postwar Italian architecture: rationalist by training, but attentive to history, to place, to the existing city. Rogers's key term is “preesistenze ambientali” — the historical and urban context into which every new building is inserted. You cannot build in Milan as if Milan did not exist. You cannot build near the Duomo as if the Duomo were not there.
The form of the tower
The Torre Velasca has a precise and motivated form. The first 17 floors are the standard tower — a rectangular prism of concrete and glass, with an exposed reinforced-concrete structure. From floor 18 upward, the tower widens: the four corners project outward supported by inclined brackets running along the whole height. The visual result is that of a medieval Lombard tower — the towers of the Castello Sforzesco, the crenellated towers of medieval cities in Northern Italy often have this flared form at the top. But the function is modern and precise: the upper floors, more spacious, are the most prestigious apartments. The form expresses the function — but in dialogue with the history of the place.
And here we must be precise: the Torre Velasca is not a skyscraper that “pretends” to be medieval. It has no battlements, no stone, no Gothic decorations. It is grey reinforced concrete, glass, steel. But its form — the flared profile at the top, the way it detaches from the city — quotes the Milanese urban vocabulary. It is a structural quotation, not a decorative one. It is the difference between historicism and contextualism.
The context: Milan after the war
The Torre Velasca cannot be understood without the context of postwar Milanese reconstruction. Milan in 1945 was partly destroyed by Allied bombing: entire neighbourhoods of the centre were razed. The city had to decide how to rebuild — and the dominant answer in the early 1950s was the international Modern Movement: new, functional buildings, with no reference to history, on the model of Le Corbusier and the Amsterdam General Extension Plan. BBPR — who had lost Banfi at Mauthausen in 1945 — decided to make a different choice: every new building must respond to the existing urban fabric, to the heights of neighbouring buildings, to the specific character of the place.
The Torre Velasca rises a few blocks from the Duomo, in an already dense area. The problem was not only to build a modern skyscraper — it was how to insert a 106-metre building into an urban fabric that reached 30. BBPR solved it with the mushroom form: the tower narrows at the lower floors so as not to block the light and view of neighbouring houses, and widens at the top where the impact on the urban fabric is less. It is an urban-planning response, not only a formal one.
Rogers and Casabella: the Italian debate
Ernesto Nathan Rogers is not only an architect — he was the editor of Casabella between 1953 and 1964, the magazine's most important years. Under his direction, Casabella became the place of Italian and international debate on architecture: where the relationship between the Modern Movement and history, between utopia and reality, between architecture and the city was discussed. Rogers published Aldo Rossi (before he became famous), defended critical regionalism against the International Style, promoted continuity with the Italian urban tradition. It was Casabella under Rogers that introduced the term “preesistenze ambientali” — the physical and cultural context into which every building is inserted — into the theoretical vocabulary of Italian architecture.
The legacy of Rogers and the Torre Velasca is enormous: not in imitation of the tower (which has not been imitated), but in the principle that modern architecture must reckon with place and history. Aldo Rossi, Giorgio Grassi, the Italian Tendenza of the 1970s — all start from this premise. Rossi cites Rogers as one of his fundamental references. Rossi's The Architecture of the City (1966) — the book that theorises building type and urban memory — is the logical consequence of Rogers's positions. The Torre Velasca is the starting point of Italian contextualism, more than twenty years before American postmodernism (Venturi, Jencks) named the problem as such.