Torre Velasca

Stand still for a moment and tip your head back. Above the narrow streets south of the cathedral, a tower of rough, rose-grey concrete rises from the rooftops. Near the top it does something odd. It swells outward, like a mushroom cap or a castle keep. The traffic hums below, a tram bell rings somewhere nearby, and the tower stands over all of it, heavy, quiet, and slightly stern.

This is the Torre Velasca, one of the most argued-about buildings in Milan. Some locals love it. Others have never forgiven it. Visitors often walk past and ask the same question: is it old or new? That confusion is the key to the whole building. It is entirely modern, finished in the late 1950s, yet it was designed to look as if it had always belonged to this medieval city.

The name comes from the small square at its feet, Piazza Velasca. The square itself takes its name from a Spanish governor of Milan, from the centuries when this city was ruled from Madrid. So a building from the age of television carries the name of a seventeenth-century nobleman. That is very Milanese. Here, layers of history sit on top of one another, often in the same street.

To understand why the tower looks the way it does, picture Milan after the Second World War. Allied bombing had damaged large parts of the centre, including this neighbourhood. The city needed offices and homes, and it needed them quickly. Land near the Duomo was precious. The answer was to build upward. But building a modern tower a few minutes from a Gothic cathedral raised a hard question. How do you add something new without insulting everything old around it?

The architects who took on that question worked as a group called BBPR. The letters stand for the surnames of four friends: Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti, and Rogers. Here is something many visitors never learn. Gian Luigi Banfi did not live to see the tower. He was arrested for his part in the resistance against fascism and died in the Nazi camp at Mauthausen in 1945. His partners kept the B at the front of their name. Every building they made afterwards carried him with them.

Now look again at the shape. The lower part of the tower is slimmer. The upper floors push outward, wider than the shaft that holds them. When the building opened, the lower floors held offices and the wider upper floors held apartments. The bigger floor plates gave homes more space. Function shaped the silhouette. But the result also reminded people of something much older — the defensive towers of medieval Italian cities, with their overhanging tops.

See those long diagonal ribs running up the outside of the tower? They are concrete struts. They carry the load of the wide upper section down into the narrower body below. Instead of hiding the structure behind smooth glass, the architects put it on display. Milanese wits gave the building a nickname because of these ribs. They call it the skyscraper with braces, as in the straps that hold up a pair of trousers. Once you hear the joke, it is hard to unsee.

The colour is worth a second look too. The tower is not the cold white or steel grey of most mid-century skyscrapers. Its surface has a warm, pinkish, slightly speckled tone. Up close it looks almost like stone. This was deliberate. The architects wanted the tower to sit comfortably beside the terracotta roofs, the brick, and the old plaster walls of central Milan. From a distance, on a hazy afternoon, it can almost blend into the city behind it.

Not everyone was charmed. At the end of the 1950s, international architects were committed to clean lines, glass, and a clean break with the past. To many of them, the Torre Velasca looked like a step backward. At a major gathering of modern architects in 1959, the design came under sharp attack. One influential British critic described Italian work of this kind as a retreat from modern architecture. For a while, the tower was a symbol of everything the purists rejected.

Time has been kinder. What once looked like nostalgia now reads as a thoughtful answer to a real problem. Today many architects see the tower as an early sign of a later idea — that new buildings should respond to their place and its memory. The tower has also appeared on lists of the world's ugliest buildings. Both opinions exist at once. Few buildings in Europe divide people so evenly, and so passionately, more than half a century after they were finished.

The city has made its own decision. The Torre Velasca is now protected as part of Italy's cultural heritage. In recent years it has gone through a major restoration. The concrete was cleaned and repaired, and the area at its base was reworked to make the square more open and welcoming. If you remember a darker, grimier tower from older photographs, that is why it may look fresher today.

For the best view, do not stand directly underneath. Walk a little way off and look for gaps between buildings. The tower shows itself in surprising places — at the end of a side street, framed between two palazzi, or rising beyond the cathedral roofline if you climb up to the Duomo terraces. From high up, you can compare its overhanging top with the spires around it. Old and new share the same skyline.

Before you move on, take one more look at the windows. They are not perfectly regular. Their spacing shifts across the face of the building, which gives the surface a hand-made, slightly restless feeling. Listen to the city around you — scooters, voices, footsteps on the stone. This tower was built for exactly this street life, not to escape it. As you walk away, glance back once. Ask yourself the question Milan has asked since the 1950s... is it old, or is it new?