Sraffa 13

Inaugurated on 20 October 2001, the Velodrome classroom building was designed by Ignazio Gardella in collaboration with his son Jacopo and architects Fabio Nonis and Marco Zanibelli. 

Mario Gardella, known as Ignazio (Milan, 30 March 1905 – Oleggio, 15 March 1999) was an Italian architect, designer and academic. He was born into a family of Genoese engineers and architects, whose progenitor was his great-grandfather Ignazio Gardella senior. Although he was christened as Mario, at the age of 18 Gardella chose to sign as Ignazio, in honor of his great-grandfather. 

The so-called “Velodromo” is a four-story building with 10 classrooms on each floor placed next to sectors of an ellipse, so as to generate an elliptical plan (hence the name, because it resembles an indoor cycle-racing track). The elliptical shape is not only a formal design choice but was determined by the difficulty of the site, inserted between several heterogeneous pre-existing buildings that hide it from view. Gardella and his project team managed to determine a monumental identity that is not rhetorical: on the contrary, it makes the building a landmark within the campus, a highly recognizable reference useful for orientation. 

The initial project, included in the Bocconi 2000 Plan, envisaged the construction of two buildings, but the second one was never built: Gardella in fact died before the completion of the first building, on 15 March 1999. Gardella's Bocconi classroom building was one of his last projects, and is noteworthy for his reference to the historical urban image of the area. For example, the windowed walls that vertically mark the elliptical body are exposed brick pillars and white painted metal panels which evoke the façades of the many factories that for decades characterized the architectural landscape of Milan, then an industrial city. In fact, one of the major gasometers in the city once stood on the site.