Abstract:

This project reimagines a vacant modern megastructure by Franco Albini and Franca Helg in San Donato Milanese as an intergenerational housing cooperative structured around clusters of shared domestic life. Instead of designing conventional housing units, it proposes a spatial framework that enables new forms of collective living.

Originally conceived as a service building for the district's urban expansion, the Terzo Palazzo is transformed into a living infrastructure where kitchens, living rooms, circulation, and care facilities are collectively managed by residents of different ages and social backgrounds. Elderly inhabitants, young families, students, caregivers, and recently arrived migrants coexist through spatial proximity, mutual support, and the participatory self-construction of lightweight domestic modules within the rehabilitated structure.

Movable furniture, adaptable partitions, and multiple access points replace fixed boundaries, allowing dwellings to expand, contract, or merge in response to changing household configurations. Domestic functions—cooking, washing, exercising, resting—are redistributed between private and communal domains, turning the building into an evolving ecosystem shaped by everyday practices.

By reactivating a dormant modernist artifact through cooperative governance and spatial flexibility, the project proposes an alternative model for affordable urban living, addressing issues of housing precarity and isolation.