Upfront

Dublin-based Grafton Architects have just opened their new building for Bocconi University in Milan. Some would have just seen an academic commission; Grafton saw much more. It is conceived as ‘a filter between the city and the university’ in the words of Grafton director Shelley McNamara, who likens it to medieval market halls.

Another Milanese characteristic the practice identified was the interior or courtyard protected by a tough carapace – hard on the outside, friendly inside. So the complex evolved as a stone-clad building with enormous spans, expressing research offices as gigantic beams set high in an inhabited roofscape. These contrast with the public streetscape drawn through the building, and the giant window into the sunken main hall, a civic space on an epic scale. The sharp rake of the lecture theatre hovers above.