CITY, DISTRICTS, MEMORY

The MIAW-Milan International Architecture Workshop is the international intensive programme at the School of Architecture Urban Planning Construction Engineering, it provides an international design forum for schools, teachers and students, but it is also an informal platform to discuss issues and share ambitions that education implies. Its aim is to stimulate cross-over thinking between researches and practitioners in the design field, involving different scales and encouraging an interdisciplinary approach towards design problems. Each class has an International Guest Professor of high profile whose activity and interests are related to the different Study Courses and Disciplinary areas characterizing all our school.

In the past editions, 2014 and 2015, Miaw studios were concentrated on a series of abandoned buildings and areas of strategic interest for the municipality of Milan. In 2016 edition, all the projects focused on the renovation and expansion of Leonardo Polimi Campus, on the base of a selection of sites which, inside or outside the actual boundaries, can be of great interest for the immediate future of our campus. MIAW 2022 tried to produce proposals for new-generation spaces and facilities, which could identify the best conditions for the educational habitats of the immediate future.

MIAW 2023 proposed instead to work on the theme in balance between memory and archive. Thanks to the support of Milan’s cultural leaders, the five Ateliers worked on a contemporary idea of a museum capable of combining the themes of Archives. Places of memory conservation where the theme of exhibiting can become a device for a deep knowledge of the city and our culture.

This year for MIAW 2024 we have decided to continue with this theme of memory related to the identity of places and the different possibilities of displaying these identities, imagining a new idea of museum.  After the celebrations – last year – for 150 years since the aggregation of the municipality of the Corpi Santi in 1873 and the centenary of the union, in 1923, of eleven municipalities outside the Cerchia dei Bastioni, MIAW 2024 will reflect on the memory of the deepest identity of the municipalities that compose the city of Milan, imagining a spread museum made up of 8 pieces corresponding to the 8 municipalities that together with the Municipio 1 of the historic centre make up the city of Milan today.