Sarfatti 25

The new Bocconi location was inaugurated on 21 December 1941, moving the seat of the University from the center to the outskirts of the city, in the area of ​​the old San Celso gas plant which the Municipality of Milan wanted to redevelop. 

After a long negotiation process, the project was entrusted to the Istrian architect Giuseppe Pagano (1896-1945), editor of the Casabella magazine and standard-bearer of rationalism in Italian architectural renewal. In the city the political climate then favored the monumentalism of the fascist regime, resulting in the modernist architect's early blueprints being harshly criticized. Pagano, however, was supported by the board of the university, in particular Bocconi president Donna Javotte Manca di Villahermosa and Vice President Giovanni Gentile managed to impose his innovative project for Via Sarfatti 25. 

Pagano overturned the traditional scheme that saw a closed structure built around a courtyard, by proposing a bright and light cruciform structure, directly inspired by Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building in Dessau, which soon became one of the most important instances of the rationalist style. 

The cross-shaped plan implies a relation with the outside and with the city, a sign of the institution's openness to the urban community. 

The building’s geometry embodies an exact study of proportions and alternating rhythms of solid and void, as suggested by the body on the façade suspended on pillars and the continuous row of balconies. 

Pagano imagined a place devoted to studying where one could breathe fresh air from an ethical and an architectural point of view, "a dream of healthy, concrete and serene architectural unity." He therefore created an open and dynamic structure, with essential and rigorous lines for the interiors where glass, iron and marble were carefully selected and alternated as construction materials. The few decorative elements were entrusted by Pagano to Leone Lodi, Arturo Martini, Salvatore Fancello, artists he held in esteem and with whom he had previously collaborated.