Santa Giulia

Santa Giulia MILAN | 2013

Situated on the outskirts of Milan, Santa Giulia is an expansion of the historical city and comprises of a new living quarter and a proposed 33-hectare park on the site of former steel and gasworks. Masterplanned by Fosters + Partners, it promises to be a lively new neighbourhood dedicated to pedestrians with new squares, outdoor markets, playgrounds, sports pitches, a lake, meadows and planted streets.

One of the key challenges of the existing site is overcoming the distance between new and proposed communities, the apparent lack of landscape definition and the steep slopes of the existing hills. Our expertise in transforming difficult territory into well-used park land is well-known and we began by moulding the hills into smooth, flowing contours to create a clearly defined network of spaces. To do this we developed a software script that allowed us to calculate the soil slopes, imported soil depths and volumes, so that we could transform the steep sided mounds into a beautiful sculptural ensemble while minimizing the amount of imported soil.