The largest therapeutic garden in the world extended as a football field, 500 meters from the Duomo and a stone’s throw from the Guastalla Gardens, the oldest public gardens in Milan.

The project of the Nuovo Policlinico renews a hospital history born in the area between via Sforza and the Rotonda della Besana almost six hundred years ago with the Cà Granda del Filarete. Since then the urban development process has seen the consolidation, within a relatively small portion of the territory, of a large number of exceptional functions often characterized by buildings with a strong symbolic and monumental value, a unique collection of “out of scale” elements characterized by a complex relationship with public space and a strong architectural identity. In this context, the enclosure of the current Ospedale Maggiore is less introverted because the set of pavilions has constituted over time a space for public use, porous and fragmentary, continually subjected to adjustments, reconversions, modifications.

The winning project of the international competition announced by the Foundation in 2007 tries to relate the two main morphological characters highlighted: the collective and permeable open space of the city of the pavilions, and the introverted and autonomous nature of the city of “large objects” outside the enclosure . The demolition of 11 existing pavilions, started in 2009, responds to a logic of intervention that is based on three main characteristics: the construction of a new integrated building that puts the complex of health and non-health services required by the Program Agreement into a system of 2001, the relations with the remaining pavilions, and the enhancement of the public value of the Ospedale enclosure as a collective space to be crossed, with particular attention to the continuity of green spaces.

The first Intervention Lot, composed in the Definitive Project of 2010 by Central Building, Piazza Umanitaria and Torre Sforza, in the design review of 2017 has as its object only the Central Building, a building of about 70,000 square meters, the largest in the center of Milan built after the nearby Palazzo di Giustizia. The planivolumetric structure of the building consists of two linear bodies 28 meters high and located at the northern and southern edges of the intervention area. The North Stecca and the South Stecca are connected by a central body, the Piastra (containing the platform of the main health services such as delivery rooms, operating rooms and diagnostic services) which rises up to over 18 meters from the ground where the garden on the roof, of over 7,000 square meters, accessible both from the city, through staircases and elevators that wind from the covered square below in proximity to the access of via Commenda, both from the community of the hospital (patients and employees), from the atriums of the bodies North and South. This garden, designed planimetrically as an uninterrupted path that returns to itself around “bubbles” that delimit flowering meadows alternating with arboreal-shrubby subjects, is also a technical device, as it represents the coverage of the “engine room” of the new Hospital, completely hidden in both visual and acoustic impact terms with a clear three-dimensional facade with a perforated but compact texture it’s close. The collective and service spaces of the staff (such as the canteen, the changing rooms) are located in the basement.

The connection between the Central Building and the other pavilions is guaranteed by the redevelopment of the existing underground paths, in correspondence with the -1 floor of the Central Building. The North and South bodies, with a planimetric organization structured mainly on a quintuple body system with a double central corridor, from the 2nd floor up to the 6th floor are mainly dedicated to hospital rooms. The lower levels see a more articulated functional composition, with the simultaneous presence of laboratories, dialysis, first aid, clinics and areas for intensive therapy. The long sides of the two linear bodies face North and South exactly, this arrangement allows to maximize the effect of solar radiation on the south-facing facades, and to have diffused lighting in those exposed to the north. To separate the North and South bodies from the central plate, open spaces (patios) of different sizes have been obtained, set in the basement except the one between the southern body and the nearest central plate at Via della Commenda, facing the Pronto’s hot chamber Pediatric and Obstetric-Gynecological Aid, set on the ground floor level.

The new covered gallery that leads to the entrances of the new building and the existing pavilions, develops from Via della Commenda to continue, as a covered path up to the Church and then up to the access of Via Francesco Sforza. In the first section in the center of the square, a glass cylinder contains the elevators that connect the underground car parks to this level and, therefore, to the roof garden. On the front of the cylinder, visible from Via della Commenda, one could project the baptismal names of the newborn every day to communicate pleasant events to the city. The public space reconfigured by the project consists of over two hectares of surface, and will be experienced by those who will cross the Policlinico pedestrian area to move from one part of the city to the other as well as from the employees or users of the services: it will be a place to stop, meet , linger, a space in which the existing vegetation will be maintained or renewed. The space for public use will be equipped and designed so as to protect and safeguard the slow flows and segregate the vehicular service flows. The station of the new M4 Sforza metro will directly serve the Hospital and the facing University of Milan, and will constitute the interchange with the M3 thanks to an underground connection with the nearby stop of Crocetta.

The foundation stone was laid on 27 November 2019.