The state exam at Politecnico di Milano

The site lies in the central-eastern part of a provincial capital, squeezed between railway infrastructure and an urban stretch of trunk road, in a historically dense and heavily built-up area. It belongs to a district under transformation that grew around a former provincial agricultural consortium and is marked by public and productive developments now partly disused, underused or abandoned. The brief focuses on a 36 x 83 m rectangular plot inside the new functional hub, zoned for “special residence”: the candidate must design a social housing building with ancillary spaces and support services on the ground floor, conceived to answer specific housing needs and to contribute to the regeneration of the district. The parameters are given: site area 2,988 sqm, plot ratio 1 sqm/sqm, maximum height 24 m, maximum building coverage 30%, permeable surface 20%, setbacks of 10 m from the property line on the street front and 5 m from the other boundaries, private parking under the Tognoli act. The programme splits the ground floor between covered space and support services, places garages and storage in the basement and distributes housing over the three upper floors, with a prescribed mix of unit sizes and a share of accessible dwellings. The session includes the linked first written test, asking the candidate to explain and justify the morphological, typological and technological choices, including structural and construction aspects.

The site is in Milan, in the south-western part of the city, near the Gratosoglio district. The property is industrial in origin and occupies a hinge position: on one side it borders the unitary fabric of the district, on the other the edge of the agricultural land of the Parco Sud. The historic morphology of the block is the recent construction of buildings within an open fabric, adapting to the new plots through gardens and private greenery. The brief gives a reasoned reading of the planning instrument sheet by sheet — geological feasibility in class III, inclusion in the consolidated urban fabric among the areas with a recognisable urban design, open-layout urban fabric, absence of administrative and protective constraints, height limits for air navigation, low landscape sensitivity requiring the opinion of the landscape commission — and on that basis asks for a mixed residential and commercial scheme reusing part of the existing buildings, with partial demolition not exceeding twenty per cent of the estimated existing gross floor area. The sizing is given: 9,000 sqm of residential gross floor area and 1,500 sqm of retail in units no larger than 200 sqm. The housing mix is prescribed by share and average size, every flat requires a double bedroom with en-suite bathroom and walk-in wardrobe, a second bathroom and a contained outdoor space, and the basement parking must serve both the dwellings and retail users.

A sealed envelope with two alternative practical-exam themes (Section A). THEME 1 — temporary housing for the relatives of patients at the Besta hospital, on a ~2,350 sqm lot in Milan between vie G. Ponzio and E. Bassini: total floor area 3,000 sqm, max 5 floors above ground (no basement required), pedestrian access from via Ponzio and vehicle access from the car park. The publicly-accessible ground floor holds a hall, reception, cafeteria, management office and toilets (about 20% of the floor area); the upper floors hold collective-service spaces (about 10% per floor). Candidates develop three accommodation types — a hotel room, a temporary mini-apartment with kitchenette and an integrated apartment — with at least one mini-apartment accessible to the disabled, complying with hygiene and barrier-free regulations. THEME 2 — the recovery of an open-court farmstead in the Milanese hinterland, a typical Po Valley agricultural structure (load-bearing brick masonry with lime-and-clay mortar, timber floors and roofs, with a fresco of Gian Galeazzo Visconti and San Bruno on the manor house), badly decayed from abandonment and covered by a declaration of historic-artistic interest. Candidates must identify the decay of the masonry, facades and timber structures with the necessary diagnostic work, and propose a conservation, restoration and residential-reuse intervention per the TRP1 transformation-area scheme of the local plan (recovery for residential use).