Oscar Niemeyer's Palazzo Mondadori Offices renovated by Carlo Ratti Associati

Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA), in collaboration with the late Italo Rota (1953-2024) and Maestro Technologies, completed the first phase of the transformation of the Palazzo Mondadori offices designed by Oscar Niemeyer between 1968 and 1975, in Italy, into Playground workspace. The building, located in Segrate, east of Milan, is owned by Generali Real Estate and houses the headquarters of the Mondadori Group.

The project proposes a radical renovation of the furniture, with the aim of creating a fully reconfigurable work contest. The initial phase focuses on more than 20,000 square meters of office space.

Oscar Niemeyer's Palazzo Mondadori Offices renovated by Carlo Ratti Associati. Photograph by DSL Studio.

The building, considered one of Oscar Niemeyer's masterpieces, houses the headquarters of the Mondadori Group, the famous Italian publishing house. The complex, which reflects the height of Niemeyer's defiant poetics, consists of a central glass parallelepiped with five floors, suspended from arcades formed by parabolic arches, which house the offices and editorial rooms. A space that floats in the air and emerges from an artificial lake, designed by the landscape architect Pietro Porcinai, from which low, sinuous structures emerge.

The transformation, by CRA, pays attention to refurbishing 1,300 units of the building’s original modular furnishings. This classic post-war furniture by Swiss Manufacturer USM has been carefully dismantled and reassembled, integrating wood and creating additional reconfigurable modules. These interventions include incorporating space for plants.

Oscar Niemeyer's Palazzo Mondadori Offices renovated by Carlo Ratti Associati. Photograph by DSL Studio.

The space has been reimagined with desks to encourage informal encounters across the building's five floors. In addition, new transparent meeting rooms have been introduced to create a greater sense of continuity between spaces, allowing people to move while enjoying the surrounding natural environment. The furniture layout has been designed to maximize natural light, accentuating the Palace's beauty and cultivating a deeper harmony with the surrounding park.

Floor plans. Oscar Niemeyer's Palazzo Mondadori Offices.

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More information

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Architects

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Carlo Ratti Associati, Italo Rota, Maestro Technologies.

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Project team

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Project Team CRA.- Carlo Ratti, Francesco Strocchio, Chiara Leonzio, Marco Santini, Nicolette Marzovilla, Rodolfo Siccardi, Jelena Krco, Gary Di Silvio, Pasquale Milieri, Gianluca Zimbardi.
Project Team Italo Rota.- Francesca Grassi.
Project Team Maestro Technologies.- Mykola Murashko, Sara Zamperion, Eren Sezer.

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Collaborators

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Maestro Technologies.
Landscape.- Pietro Porcinai.

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Client

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Mondadori Group.

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Area

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20,000 m².

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Dates

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2024.

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Location / Venue

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Via Arnoldo Mondadori, 1. 20054 - Milano MI, Italy.

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Photograph

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DSL Studio. (Delfino Sisto Legnani, Melania Delle Grave).

Italo Rota

Italo Rota (1953-2024) was one of the most important Italian designers of recent decades. In the 1980s he designed the interior renovation of the Musée d'Orsay, with Gae Aulenti, the rooms of the French School in the Cour Carré of the Louvre, the lighting of the Notre Dame cathedral along the Seine in Paris and the renovation of the centre of Nantes. In the 1990s he returned to Milan and with the new studio he created projects and architecture becoming one of the references of new architecture. Symbolic are the Museo del Novecento in Piazza Duomo in Milan, the headquarters of Columbia University in New York, the Hindu Temple in Dolvy in India, and the Media Library in Perugia. Over the years, Italo Rota developed unrivalled expertise in the museography field and exhibitions, creating countless iconic exhibitions and installations. With CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, created the Italian Pavilion in Dubai for the EXPO Dubai 2020, the creative direction of the MEET Digital Culture Center projects in Milan, Casa Mutti in Parma, MAE Museum in Fiorenzuola d'Arda, AGO Museums Modena.

Carlo Ratti Associati

Carlo Ratti Associati (born in 1971 in Turin, Italy) is an international design and innovation office based in Torino, Italy, with branches in New York and London. Drawing on Carlo Ratti’s research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Senseable City Lab, the office is currently involved in many projects across the globe, embracing every scale of intervention – from furniture to urban planning. The work of the practice merges design with cutting-edge digital technologies, so as to contribute to the creation of an architecture “that senses and responds”.

Noteworthy achievements at the urban and architectural scale include the masterplan for a creative hub in the City of Guadalajara, the renovation of the Agnelli Foundation HQ in Torino, the Future Food District at Expo Milano 2015, and the Digital Water Pavilion at Expo Zaragoza 2008. Product design projects range from experimental furniture for Cassina to light installations for Artemide, to responsive seating systems with Vitra.

In all these circumstances, the studio investigated the ways in which new technologies, including digital sensors and portable devices, are changing both the built environment and everyday life. The works of the practice have been featured in publications worldwide, including The New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, BBC, Wired, Boston Globe, Der Spiegel, Corriere della Sera, and Domus. The studio's projects have been exhibited in cultural venues such as the Venice Biennale, New York’s MoMA, Istanbul Design Biennial, and many others.

Carlo Ratti Associati is the only design firm whose works have been featured twice in TIME Magazine’s “Best Inventions of the Year” list – respectively with the Digital Water Pavilion in 2007 and the Copenhagen Wheel in 2014. In the last years, the office has been involved in the launch of Makr Shakr, a startup producing the world’s first robotic bar system.

Oscar NIEMEYER

Oscar Niemeyer was born in 1907 in the hillside district of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. Niemeyer’s architecture, conceived as lyrical sculpture, expands on the principles and innovations of Le Corbusier to become a kind of free-form sculpture.

In 1938-39 he designed the Brazilian Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair in collaboration with Lucio Costa. His celebrated career began to blossom with his involvement with the Ministry of Education and Health (1945) in Rio de Janeiro. Niemeyer’s mentor, Lucio Costa, architect, urban planner, and renowned pioneer of Modern architecture in Brazil, led a group of young architects who collaborated with Le Corbusier to design the building which became a landmark of modern Brazilian architecture. It was while Niemeyer was working on this project that he met the mayor of Brazil's wealthiest state, Juscelino Kubitschek, who would later become President of Brazil. As President, he appointed Niemeyer in 1956 to be the chief architect of Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, his designs complementing Lucio Costa’s overall plans. The designs for many buildings in Brasilia would occupy much of his time for many years.

"As an architect," he states, "my concern in Brasilia was to find a structural solution that would characterize the city's architecture. So I did my very best in the structures, trying to make them different with their columns narrow, so narrow that the palaces would seem to barely touch the ground. And I set them apart from the facades, creating an empty space through which, as I bent over my work table, I could see myself walking, imagining their forms and the different resulting points of view they would provoke.

Internationally, he collaborated with Le Corbusier again on the design for the United Nations Headquarters (1947-53) in New York, contributing significantly to the siting and final design of the buildings. His own residence (1953) in Rio de Janeiro has become a landmark. In the 1950s, he designed an Aeronautical Research Center near Sao Paulo. In Europe, he undertook an office building for Renault and the Communist Party Headquarters (1965) both in Paris, a cultural centre for Le Havre (1972), and in Italy, the Mondadori Editorial Office (1968) in Milan and the FATA Office Building (1979) in Turin. In Algiers, he designed the Zoological Gardens, the University of Constantine, and the Foreign Office.

Published on: August 10, 2024

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