Organons

Project Site: Magazzini Raccordati
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Date: April 2023 Location: Milan, Italy Area: 40,000m2 Function: Reuse Status: Competition (Shortlisted)

Organons was developed for Tunnel Evangelion, an international competition envisioning new futures for Milan’s Magazzini Raccordati. The brief called for a masterplan for the two-kilometre tunnel complex, alongside the detailed design of four prototype tunnels. The proposal introduces Organons: a family of architectural instruments conceived as infrastructural organs. Essential services such as electricity, water, ventilation, and light are integrated into sculptural elements that also operate as furniture, counters, or stages. Their formal language draws from the Art Nouveau ornamentation of Milano Centrale, establishing a renewed dialogue between the tunnels and their street-facing façades. Rather than prescribing fixed programmes, the Organons are designed to move between tunnels, enabling temporary uses that can evolve over time. This mobile and incremental strategy allows activities to emerge, adapt, and consolidate, setting the groundwork for long-term reactivation. The project was selected as a finalist and exhibited during Milan Design Week at Dropcity, within the tunnels themselves.

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The Magazzini Raccordati represent one of Milan’s most remarkable yet overlooked infrastructures. Extending for over two kilometres beneath the tracks of Milano Centrale, this sequence of more than one hundred tunnels once formed the logistical backbone of the city. Today, they remain as vast, hollow shells, stripped of function, disconnected from the station, and largely dormant. Organons approaches these spaces not as empty containers to be filled, but as latent structures capable of supporting new forms of life. Like an abandoned machine awaiting reactivation, the tunnels require more than equipment. They need a system of organs that can sustain activity while reconnecting them to the city. The Organons are conceived as architectural instruments. Each element operates simultaneously as infrastructure and furniture, integrating electricity, ventilation, water, and light into sculptural forms that also function as tables, counters, partitions, or stages. Their formal language draws from the Art Nouveau detailing of Milano Centrale. By extracting and reinterpreting these motifs, the project extends the station’s identity into the tunnels, re-establishing a dialogue between façade, infrastructure, and civic space. The proposal unfolds through a phased strategy. Initially, the service lanes behind the tunnels are activated as infrastructural arteries, allowing the Organons to connect and operate. Temporary programmes then begin to occupy the spaces, including exhibitions, lectures, markets, and workshops that reintroduce public life. These interventions accumulate over time, gradually shifting perception from abandoned threshold to accessible interior. As activity stabilises, permanent uses and tenants emerge, forming a layered ecology of formal and informal programmes. Rather than prescribing a fixed masterplan, Organons proposes a framework for regeneration, an adaptable toolkit that enables multiple futures to emerge. Moving from tunnel to tunnel, the devices transform emptiness into potential and make the process of reactivation visible. Ducts, vents, and shafts extend to the façades, signalling activity within and turning infrastructure into a communicative layer within the city. The project was selected as a finalist and exhibited during Salone del Mobile at Dropcity, within the tunnels themselves. Experiencing the proposal in situ reinforced its intent, not to overwrite the Magazzini Raccordati, but to provide the means through which they can be reoccupied, reconnected, and reactivated. For PAN- PROJECTS, Organons forms part of an ongoing exploration into the reuse of urban fabric. Reuse is understood not only as a pragmatic response, but as an architectural position, a way of projecting new futures through existing structures, and of transforming overlooked infrastructures into active parts of the city once again.

Project Site: Magazzini Raccordati
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