Campus 2.0

The buildings pay tribute to the Ca’ Granda, the 15th-century brick building designed by the Renaissance architect Filarete, which today hosts the central seat of the University of Milan. The facades have been designed with an innovative construction technique, with each brick individually positioned by a robotic arm and treated as a pixel within a large-scale bas-relief. The result will be a three-dimensional tapestry with textual and visual content.

The project’s main typological features – the courtyards and the common ground – are also inspired by the Ca’ Granda, which was the closest realization of Filarete’s vision for a utopian city that he called Sforzinda. The Campus 2.0 reinterprets Filarete’s design principles, albeit with 21st-century digital
technologies and new approaches to teaching and learning.

“Recent data analyses of human interaction on academic campuses have shown that there is a direct correlation between the physical proximity of researchers and scientific output,” says Carlo Ratti, founding partner of CRA and director of the Senseable City Lab at the MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology “In other words, human interaction is an essential component of the discovery process. The recent pandemic, which forced scholars to live and work for months on end in isolation, only reinforced the importance of physical space. Our Campus 2.0 design elaborates on Filarete’s thinking from almost 500 years ago to create a testing ground that will promote interaction among diverse communities”.

“Filarete’s utopia is often visualized with the eight-pointed star shape of Sforzinda, his ideal city. However, if you zoom in and take a closer look at the design, you can appreciate other compelling features,” says architect Italo Rota, the project's creative consultant. “Filarete thought that architecture should focus on durability, simplicity, and affordable technical sophistication. He wanted his buildings to become the backdrop of a new humanism, blurring the boundaries between private and public spaces. At the new campus in Milan, we strive to realize Filarete’s utopia, on the very site where six years ago, millions of people from all over the world met for the World Expo”.

One of the project’s defining features is the common ground, a public space that winds its way across the Campus. This uninterrupted set of walkways and crossings connect the buildings and meanders across courtyards. The “Common Ground” allows people to walk outdoors all year long – under a canopy or portico – over a length of more than 1,200 meters. The path continues inside the buildings, with an additional 800 meters of accessible walkways at the mezzanine level. The common ground serves to reinforce the connection between the campus and the surrounding Mind neighborhood, fostering interaction between the academic community, and the companies and R&D centers that operate in the innovation district.