The history of this place, the piazza, and the void around it is manifested in the construction of this new civil building. It is deprived of the rhetoric and instead forms a strong connection to the transformation of the city center.
The formal image is already lost due to numerous fortuitous and in fortuitous tampering of its urban morphology. Yet the place remains a memorable image and has been recomposed through the restoration of its surviving monuments and its "Milanesità" characteristics, or those qualities typical to Milan, that emanate from its building fabric and its relationship with the materials. The materiality of the architecture in general is particularly Milanese. The permanent character is testimony not only to fashion and time, but also to the more radical transformations, beginning with peaceful civic values, suitableness, and authoritativeness that can be synthesized into more simple words. The discrete use of a material in choosing architectonic relationships is, however, a recognizable quality of the major periods in Milanese architecture.
The project is the construction of a 90-room hotel with a large public hall that distributes the meeting and conference rooms on the first underground floor. A two-floor underground parking garage is also planned.
The design proposes a facade with a homogenous division and done in a grainy plaster in a color similar to the neighboring historic buildings (Archbishopric and Beccaria Palazzo). The facades are composed with respect to the structural axis foreseen in the master plan and the height changes are each marked with a thin stone rim at the beginning of each level of the elevation. They are also used to cover the portico. Three composite facades were developed with the balcony faces as a system of structural reference on which the order of the principal architectonic elements is able to give it decor and homogeneity.
The system of facades is composed within the division of plaster with terracotta cornices. These tone down the depth of the metal window fixtures and the metal hand railings fixed to them.
Finally, a varying composition, or better, a characterization of the facade using Montorfaro granite was introduced to highlight the entrance to the parts dedicated to public space.