Fifty years after the laying of the first stone of the Town Hall in Cusano Milanino, an exhibition in the halls of Town Hall invites to discover this extraordinary building and its architect, Vico Magistretti.
The show - promoted by the Administration of the Municipality of Cusano Milanino, curated by the architect Andrea Cassone and carried out in collaboration with Fondazione Vico Magistretti - already recalls in the title, Essenziale Magistretti, the particular charm of a building which, at a distance of many years, keeps all its modernity intact.
Conceived in 1963 and built between 1969 and 1971, the Town Hall of Cusano Milanino belongs to a particularly intense period in Vico Magistretti's career. In the same years the architect was working in via Conservatorio and in via San Marco in Milan, in Meda (Mi) and in Framura (La Spezia). The Town Hall shares with these interventions the characteristic features of Magistretti's approach: concreteness, attention to detail, attention to the context, study of volumes and shapes.
The exhibition, through extensive documentation complemented by documentary films, traces the history of the project and brings out the aspects of its strong innovation. The Town Hall of Cusano was born as an 'open' public building also in its shape and in its paths, where the internal volumes are already perceptible from the outside and where, upon entering, you can immediately grasp the organization of the spaces. An "essential" building, in fact, which renounces the use of noble or precious materials to entrust solely to the design the expression of the monumentality that a public seat must have.
From 6.4.2019 to 6.5.2019