The Corner, Milan Design, Mies van der Rohe Award 2022 Nominee, Architecture, Italian Building Images

The Corner, Mies van der Rohe Award 2022 Nominee

10 Feb 2021

The Corner

Design: Atelier (s) Alfonso Femia

Location: Milan, Italy

The Corner by Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia selected for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2022

Candidates for the 2022 Mies van der Rohe Award of the European Union for Contemporary Architecture have been announced: representing Italy, among the nominees, “The Corner” signed by Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia.

The official list, presented by the European Commission with the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, for the 2022 award – named after the master of the Modern Movement – shows the best architectural projects in the old continent and includes 449 works from 41 countries. Among the 18 Italians selected, ‘The Corner’ by Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia appears in the Office Building category. Redevelopment project of the Generali Real Estate building located in Milan, on the corner of Viale della Liberazione and Viale Melchiorre Gioia.

The different facades act as a distinctive element strongly characterizing the entire structure, and the urban area in which it is located, an object of profound and radical change in recent years.

This is what architect Alfonso Femia, founder of the studio with offices in Milan, Paris, and Genoa, tells us about the project: “We meet a building in an urban area where everything has changed over time. A sentinel on the border between industrial settlements, infrastructures, and the beginning of the urban city, with an immediate, strong, almost alienating change of scale and perception. The city was the background, and the building the threshold to enter the metropolitan area of Milan from the northwest. At the limits of that threshold, a new, contemporary urban centrality was created and is in continuous development.

Today the building is almost at the center of that transformation, it remains consistent with it, and at the same time it stays faithful to its role as a “presence/preexistence”. It interacts with the changing surroundings and reaffirms its precise urban and architectural identity. The Corner derives its name from its founding design idea: the corner of a building tells the story of the city and speaks with a different voice for each facade. The Corner dialogues with the light of Milan, with its sky, with its compressed and expanded perspectives, with its new horizons”.

The nominated works for the Mies van der Rohe Award starting from 1988, constitute the most complete archive on contemporary architecture in Europe, unique for the accurate selection of projects, analyzed and chosen by a jury of architects, critics, journalists, and curators. The nominated works for the Mies van der Rohe Award starting from 1988, constitute the most complete archive on contemporary architecture in Europe, unique for the accurate selection of projects, analyzed and chosen by a jury of architects, critics, journalists, and curators.

The Corner
project by Alfonso Femia / Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia AF517 with FOR engineering, for Generali Real Estate

The Mies van der Rohe Award
The EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture is a biennial prize highlighting outstanding architectural works built across Europe demonstrating excellence in conceptual, social, cultural and technical terms.

Since 2001, the prize has been co-organised by the European Commission and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and the award ceremony is held in May in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona, Spain.

IThe award it raises awareness of quality architecture and its contribution to the wellbeing of citizens and the sustainable development of European cities, towns and villages.

Alfonso Femia is the creator and co-founder of 5+1 agency in 1995, that became 5+1AA in 2005, and that is transformed into Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia in 2017. He has been a Professor of Architectural Design Didactics at Kent State University in Florence, at the Universities of Ferrara and Genoa and visiting professor at the HongKong University in China.

In 2019, he has received from the cultural association LP the medal of the Italian President of the Republic being the artistic director of the third edition of the Pisa Biennale. Among his most recent projects, let’s quote the Milanese Ice Factory (2009), the IULM University in Milan (2015), the Marseilles Docks (2015), the new BNL-BNP Paribas headquarters in Rome (2016), the Dallara Academy in Parme (2018), the building The Corner in Milan (2019).

He has recently won the international competitions for the redevelopement of the First Italian State Mint in Rome, the construction of a hotel in Europacity, Paris and the new Sports City in Cosenza. He currently develops projects in La Ciotat, Montpellier, Lyon, Toulouse, Avignon, Marseilles, Tashkent, Milan, Vicenze, Algiers, La Spezia and Rome.