A THIRD PLACE

[ARCHITECTURE _HARVARD GSD // SPRING 2023]

Our site, situated along the boundaries of both Milan’s Chinatown and the fraught history of the Spanish Wall ruins, provides an opportunity to act as a doorway bridging moments of in-between, programmatically, spatially, and culturally. The imprint of the Spanish wall becomes a soft enclosure for gathering, the infilled voids of the fragment become an extruded structural system, while the facade adopts a typical Milanese grid composition. The thickened bars of the extrusions define in-between corridor spaces, transformed into restaurants, hotel amenities, culinary school classrooms, and hotel units. Across the site, the third “ruin” uses the layers of the courtyard facades as guides for carved reliefs. The ground floor becomes a hub of the culinary school, featuring a specialty kitchen, opening to the back entrance and bridging the project and Chinatown. These classrooms integrate both the school and the housing above, made available to students and residents alike. The upper floors currently house residents of the neighborhood, and in an effort to maintain their homes, I will only be adapting the facades, increasing access to natural light, while transforming the larger punched window additions into benches, allowing for more gathering on a very narrow external corridor.