What the future Malpensa hospital in Milan will be like

Long before becoming economic capital, Milan was a decisive laboratory for the architecture of care. When Filarete, at the request of Francesco Sforza, designed the Ca’ Granda, he invented much more than a building: he established a typology. The hospital as an urban organism, built in courtyards, capable of welcoming, ordering, protecting. An architecture that brings together space, hygiene, control and public representation. That model, destined to change and enter into crisis, however marked a point of no return: since then the hospital is no longer just a technical container, but a form of city. It is within this genealogy, which is far from over, that relevant news for contemporary Italian architecture is inserted.

While the works of the New Polyclinic Hospital designed by Stefano Boeri Architetti are concluded, Zaha Hadid Architects ha won the international competition for Great Malpensa Hospitala new health campus that will bring together Gallarate and Busto Arsizio in a single public structure intended for serve nearly one million inhabitants. Not an isolated episode, but a further chapter in the relationship between Italy and one of the most influential firms on the international scene, after the Salerno maritime station, the Afragola high-speed station and the recent competition for the new headquarters of the Campania Region.

The project presents itself as a large constructed ring, compact and continuous, which contains within itself a sequence of green spacescourtyards and therapeutic gardens. Five floors above ground and a basement level organize approximately 90 thousand square meters according to the criterion of intensity of care, with a distribution that clearly separates the flows of patients, staff, visitors and logistics. An organism designed to be crossed, understood, adapted. If the courtyard hospital of Sforza Milan responded to the needs of another era, and if the twentieth century experimented with the pavilion model to manage epidemics and distances, the Malpensa project takes note of a further step: technology today allows us to merge, overlap and make flexible what once had to be separated. The result is a unitary, modular building, ready to transform over time without losing efficiency, capable of integrating new equipment, new protocols, new treatment methods.

On the ground floor, an internal road functions as a public axis, connecting the entrance to the landscaped areas of the campus and giving the hospital a civic dimension. Natural light, acoustic control, the presence of greenery and decompression spaces enter the project as real architectural devices. From a construction and energy point of view, the building adopts modular prefabricated systems, ventilated facades with solar shading, renewable systems and advanced digital tools for management and maintenance. A complex machinedesigned to last and adapt, responding from time to time to the new needs and goals of science and medicine.