Since the 1930s, Milan has been one of the few Italian cities to embrace tall buildings. And even today, it’s essentially the only place in the country where skyscrapers continue to be built.
The high-rises were imported to Europe in the first decades of the 20th Century. They were not aimed at solving practical and spatial problems, but rather at satisfying the wish to modernize architecture and cities. Thus, skyscrapers were more a symbol, a metaphor for modernity, than a solution to urban issues. In Italy, the American typology took on features inspired by traditional history and culture, starting from the medieval patterns of towers. It is no coincidence that the first Italian skyscrapers were called towers or ‘torrioni’, meaning great towers. Also concerning the materials and the structure, the Italian tall buildings were very different from the American ones: the traditional use of reinforced concrete and a better understanding of its properties than steel, led to constructions with a very different structure to the original Chicago skyscrapers, usually built using a steel skeleton. This paper aims to highlight the distinctive features of the Italian – and therefore Milanese – towers, erected from the Thirties to the present day, focusing on the approach of local culture and indigenous architects to the tall building typology.