The preservation of memory in the digital age
The documents deposited in the archives are the tools that allow us, as individuals and a collective society, to select and store what our subjective minds remember. Before us we have a new challenge and new opportunities: digital technology can transform and enhance the historic archives of paper files, allowing multiple copies, and making them universally accessible, with the promises of many more possibilities. At this point in time, the potential is largely unexplored. What form should the preservation of memory take in the digital age? The Casa della Memoria is the first portrayal of a physical solution to this challenge.
The ability to preserve the past while creating a future that is enriched by new practices is what distinguishes progress from mere change. The Casa della Memoria will utilise the full potential of new technologies without detracting from what has been painfully acquired through the course of history. Firstly, it will house the material archives of historical institutions, whose mission it is to document the last century of the city of Milan: l’Associazione Italiana Vittime del Terrorismo; L’Associazione Nazionale Ex Deportati; l’Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia; l’Associazione Familiari Vittime della Strage di Piazza Fontana; l’Istituto Nazionale per la storia del movimento di Liberazione in Italia. But at the same time the Casa della Memoria will grow from its trunk of paper files into a new digital repository, propagating knowledge further afield.
The Casa della Memoria is located in the Isola district of Milan, which is close to the heart of its citizens, and is almost a symbol of the values of the city, its industry and its ability to generate progress. This district is now in a state of intense transformation. Conserving history in the archives is not sufficient. Like a magic lantern, the Casa della Memoria casts pictures of the past in the same places where the events transpired. So the past is not destroyed, but is saved and made visible.
Augmented Reality is a concept born in the last fifteen years to suggest the connections between the digital and real. New instances of Augmented Reality, applied to architecture, challenge the traditional concepts of perception and use of space and hence, how we design them. With invisible sensors and interactive surfaces (using simple projections on translucent surfaces or smartphones, tablets and laptops with webcams) the space of our physical present becomes the background to a new reality and with modern, intangible digital tools we can create new environments, scenarios of the past or visions of the future.
Concept
Garden, archive and magic lantern - the Casa della Memoria is all three simultaneously. Lifting the corner of the park where it stands, it creates a structure of shelves that preserve the documents of the archives and reach out toward the park, the neighbourhood and, ultimately, the city. And on the glass of the windows and the gallery displays, much like a magic lantern, the visitor sees the physical reality of the present as it once was. The archive-documents processed into digital images, projected and magnified, situate this reality in the historical past.
Non-Stop Garden
Like the trunk of a tree, the two green cores contain the metabolic system of the building, in the human flows through the stairs and elevators, air and fluids in the ducts and pipes, and the vertical stratification of the archivedatabase. In the branches, where the archivedocuments are stored, are the areas in which information exchange with the surrounding reality takes place: historical knowledge is the oxygen of this new plant. Considering the building as the central element of Casa della Memoria, it penetrates the ground with an infrastructure of two green vertical cores that rise from the park and a series of inhabitable spaces connecting with the archives, which sit horizontally. The effect is that of a city on its side that extends vertically – a structure that carries the genetic material for potential growth. The green physical structure of Casa della Memoria is integrated with that of the new digital archive database - dynamic, open and infinitely expandable.
The building culminates with thick bushes of bamboo on the roof, which, with each passing day grow higher, driving the building higher and higher like a green garden, competing with the nearby skyscrapers, and a metaphor for a city that is growing in a new way, without negating the past, nor reality, but growing from it.
The physical archive
Like branches of a tree, the archives sit between the park and the city and support the functional spaces of the Casa della Memoria. The megaarchive becomes the structural complex and the physical storage area for the memories of the various associated institutions.
The digital archive
With the creation of a dynamic, accessible and updateable database of the 2.0 variety, the digital archive completes the physical archive and becomes an instrument of knowledge storage and dissemination. The new digital archive makes the content of the physical archive easily accessible (1); like magic curtains you can draw over the windows, you can see the surrounding location of Milan enhanced with digital content (2), and from the urban scale the archive expands like a cloud of data that can be picked up by the now-popular smartphones and tablet devices (3). These tools become active devices in understanding the events of history in the same location where they transpired.
The building. A magic lantern of Augmented Reality
The visitor who, coming from the local neighbourhood through the park, follows the course of the building through an experience that leads him first to touch the physical archive and the material traces left by the past, and then to view the city from a very different perspective – like magic curtains that you can draw over the windows you can project, at will, the documents of your choice, of those collected in the archive and any other image of the city of Milan that the staff members of the Casa della Memoria make available in the digital archive. The houses across the street, the park as well the modern buildings in the vicinity come to life with a new life: not simply inert signs of past or contemporary materials, but active spaces where memory is made visible.
The district and the city. En route to a dispersed digital archive
The experience of the Casa della Memoria does not end when you leave the building. Throughout the surrounding neighbourhood, the digital devices now available to all, such as mobile phones and tablets, allow you to view the images broadcast from the Casa della Memoria and look at everything afresh, as it was in the past. These same devices make the contents, digital and digitized, archives and the memories of those who choose to leave their stories at the Casa della Memoria, available without having to remove them from their shelves - digital monuments of a past that will never be lost.
A journey through the Casa della Memoria • Augmented Reality
A library of branches, piercing the green wall, which takes you down to the street. Just inside the building raises like a chimney with vertical shelves, stairs, elevators, and trees for a roof. Looking back down, the wide opening at the entrance frames the park and leads, through a library of stairs, a path up through the archives. The experience of physical contact with the archive, always present as the element that supports the large volumes cantilevering outwards, it is enriched by a series of magical curtains, devices that, once activated, create possible routes through the archived memories: from the glass cases that protect the books and documents to the windows overlooking the park, all can tell a story of an augmented reality. If we move the digital panel towards the centre of the park we activate the history of October 20, 1944, with the hornbeam trees along Via Volturno and the roar of the bombers arriving in Milan, then the first flames of the Breda.
We continue to rise through the building; opposite the park there is the long library that protects the archive-folders ending in the cantilevered components over via Confalonieri. The panel slides back and pops up behind the curtains of the Casa della Memoria with Libero – nicknamed Aiace during the war – who escaped the raid the night before and starts telling us his story.
On the shelf to the right is the book “Avevamo 15 anni”, published last year by the same Libero, who often frequents the offices of the ANPI on the third floor. Luigi, who is still called “Ulysses”, often uses the common room in the basement, to tell high school kids his stories. It’s a beautiful day, we go up to the roof terrace. You want to go down the vertical garden, from here it doesn’t seem too far.
Zoning
A clear spatial designation of functions characterizes the interior of the Casa della Memoria: a central core houses the four vertical components, each of which leads to three adjoining galleries. The outer branches house the offices of the institutions involved, while in the middle are the reading rooms, linked in turn by a series of steps that create a vertical path through the archives. The terraces on the galleries complete the tour by offering a panoramic view of the park and the Isola district. The basement, which can be accessed from both the entrance foyer, and directly from the park through a stepped-auditorium, is partly available as a multipurpose space and partly as a repository for documents that require special storage conditions. The presence of a large patio to enjoy the natural light allows the multi-purpose space to be used at all hours of the day, while the dual access - from the park and the foyer - allows, if necessary, it to be separated from the other functions of the building.
Flexibility
The Casa della Memoria is flexible in many ways, from the use of physical space to the digital quality of the new archive and the dynamic nature of light in the building. The multipurpose room in the basement also has a high degree of flexibility in its spatial configuration according to the requirements needed, with the presence of movable walls. In the galleries, modular office partitions can be created for use by the various historical institutions. The galleries are central to the consultation of the archive-documents using the central bookcase as the core element to organize the space: steps, shelves, seats and touch screen panels you can take to access the digital archive. Seats situated around the space allow you to sit, read and enjoy the view through the full-length windows.
More Digital> Less space
Although at this stage of the project there has been a scrupulous adherence to the demands of the functional program, we should to take into account how the digital archive reduce the space needed for physical storage. The physical storage space can therefore be reduced to the essentials, while a good part can be condensed into a safe place, like the basement, and remain accessible at times.
Principles of sustainability
The building retains a relationship with the local environment and with the prevailing climatic conditions. The shape of the building and housing help to control the dynamic performance throughout the day and seasons. Like a living organism it is open to the sun in order to benefit from the contributions of free heat in winter and in summer it shields itself to prevent overheating. Natural ventilation is used to improve the internal microclimate, air quality and take advantage of passive cooling in spring and autumn. The building, like a tree rooted in the soil, gets its lifeblood and energy from the ground. The heating and cooling needs are met by heat pumps of a multipurpose variety that use as a primary energy source groundwater. The groundwater, whose temperature is almost constant throughout the year, is a formidable heat source that nature provides free of charge. With this system, besides allowing a considerable flexibility of use will reduce substantially the energy consumption of electricity and fuel; it is not necessary to have dedicated thermal power stations. Thereby increasing the safety conditions will be void and erasing local CO2 emissions. In addition, the offset will be optimal considering the energy needs of different aspects of the building, the different activities and the different level, over time, of occupation of the building. The leaves of the tree, which through the process of photosynthesis produce energy, are integrated into the building with photovoltaic systems in the roof and covering the building skin.
Among the latest generation of solar systems on the market if one is chosen based on the technology of monocrystalline silicon cells with a very high efficiency, more than 20%, and it is installed to maximize the potential capacity, it will be able to take advantage of scattered radiation and an increased proportion of light spectrum. This will result in the capacity to produce more energy at the same installed capacity (more kWh per kWp installed). For each kW peak it avoids the emission of 1 tonne of CO2 a year, 2 kg of NOx per year and saves 0.4 TEP. The building contributes to improving the local microclimate, not only thanks to the zero emission of CO2 guaranteed by the heat pumps, but also through the use of “Eco active” coating and floor materials.
Most of the paved areas in the outdoor spaces
intended for vehicular traffic see the use of special coatings that contain in the cement matrix photocatalyst agents (for example, titanium oxide), which can reduce air pollution, transforming organic pollutants and inorganic pollutants such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, aromatic and benzene compounds, into small amounts of salts that are subsequently removed by rain and wind.
Green wall
In a densely populated city, green space is precious. The Casa della Memoria will present a new solution. The park rises upwards to form the vertical structure of the building and creates a microscopic ecosystem that extends from the existing one and exists in its own right. The application of green walls, now widely utilised throughout the world, presents an undeniable opportunity to create unexpected cultural and aesthetic scenarios. For others it fulfils the dream of an ecological solution for the modern world, an idea more or less left unspoken of the longing for nature of the urbanized contemporary man.
Despite the obvious artificiality of the structural system to provide support, the vertical green manages to cloak the built structure, softening what we see of the large mass, and above all, bringing with it an unmistakable message of the return to the indispensable need for biodiversity in the city. A unique plant that symbolically reclaims the unused space, and that succeeds, with the use of colours, textures, and patterns linked to the passing seasons, to be the protagonist of the building and contribute to ecological balance on the micro-urban scale. There is also a benefit derived from the same building in the climate created, since the double layer of felt, which is the rhizosphere of the plants introduced onto the building, are attached waterproof panels of expanded PVC, which in turn are mounted on a frame, capable of allowing air to circulate between the building and the green wall itself, without any risk of water infiltration. Then there is the component of evapo-transpiration, which can lead to great advantages on a microclimatic level, linked to both cooling and, particularly, the elimination of sunlight reflection and hence direct solar radiation.
The main wall of the building, the green wall, continues directly from the park grass, and the transition of direction is expressed in the blend of turf in the area of the slope by creating a unique feature, firstly with the small pioneer species, then with larger plants and finally shrubs and sun-loving species. The green is the protagonist of an area equal to the entire area of the facades facing the park, towards via Confalonieri and also the inner walls of the cantilevered galleries, which are populated with vegetation. With this choice of vegetation and the use of species of tropical and subtropical plants there is no risk, either from the point of view of the induction of parasites, nor from that of interference with the climate and the use of the various floors. By recycling the water unused in the root systems of the plants in the infrastructure of the building, ie. grey water, we can reduce the costs in terms of managing energy inputs. Similarly in the choice of plant species and cultivation we can minimise the interventions and management needed.
Finally, the transition between the structure and the sky proposes a metaphor for which the green with almost certainly be forlorn and dying, so a more ethereal solution is through the implementation on the roof of bamboo, thick and incorporeal, which allows for the changing shape of the building over time.
Structural Diagrams
The structure of the building abides by the architectural concept of minimizing the impact on the ground floor of the building to give the possibility of the green wall finding the maximum area for growth and development. The foundation is made of a concrete plate on which the building attaches through structural steel cores. The concrete plate solution is necessary to better distribute the loads over a large area without providing a deep system of piling because, 20 metres below the site the M3 metro line passes.
Attached to the steel core braced with steel girders, are the steel trusses that create the cantilevering galleries where the offices, archives and reading rooms are located. The galleries that house the archives enclose the steel trusses, which provide the central element of support for the cantilevering structure The floor trusses link the steel profiles of the galleries with reinforced concrete.
