Urbanization, which intensified after World War II, was felt most strongly in the industrially developed north of Italy: both residents of neighboring villages and migrants from the south of the country moved to Milan and other large cities. In order to resettle the “new townspeople” who did not have special savings, residential buildings were created on the former agricultural lands far from the center on the principle of satellite cities. For example, in the mid-1950s, Piero Bottoni developed the layout of the Gallaratese district, about seven kilometers from the historical core of Milan. The plan was implemented in two stages, and Gallaratese II was taken up in 1964. Within its allocated borders there was a private plot of 12 hectares, acquired back in 1944 as an agricultural resource by the Monte Amiata company. During negotiations with the city authorities, it was decided that the company will act on its land as a developer of social housing, which was planned in Gallaratese by the municipality.
In 1967, Monte Amiata commissioned the development of the project to the AYDE bureau, headed by Carlo Aimonino, who in 1969 invited Aldo Rossi, his colleague at the IUAV Institute of Architecture in Venice, to collaborate. The task was to create a complex for two and a half thousand people. By that time, residential towers and slabs were or were being built around according to a sparse modernist plan. The architects took a radically different approach: their buildings and the spaces between them were complex and varied. More precisely, this approach was chosen by Aimonino, and Rossi compared his body to a blade cutting through the thicket. He also made a more bizarre comparison: "This red dinosaur with a stiff and long white tail now rises terribly above the plain." The dinosaur is Aimonino's buildings, its tail is Rossi's house.
Carlo Aimonino erected four buildings in Monte Amiato (the complex was named after its developer), he was also responsible for their location and for the structure of public spaces. Three residential buildings, 150 meters long, diverge from the open amphitheater, which also plays the role of a "vestibule": they seem to be hinged to it. Two triangular areas are formed between them. Another building, only 13 apartments, departs from the central one like a bridge. All these buildings and public spaces are painted in a restrained red tone, which also refers to the brick of Trajan's market in Rome, one of the sources of inspiration for architects. The Marseilles residential unit also had a significant influence.”Le Corbusier, from which Aimonino took, for example, the layout of the bunk apartments. Its buildings are distinguished by a very wide variety of housing sizes and layouts - from very small apartments for singles to the mentioned duplexes and apartments with patios, from one-room to five-room dwellings. Also, the buildings are formally diverse: the volumes of glass blocks are combined with cylinders of vertical circulation units, galleries, openwork balconies. The color of the facades is complemented by bright red window frames, yellow "transit" components, ceramic tiles are used - and so on.
Aldo Rossi, on the other hand, designed a formally reduced structure: its white body, more than 180 meters long, is raised above the ground with the help of a gallery of plate supports, referring to Milan's apartment buildings, including buildings from the interwar period, and to the Monastery of La Tourette. There is much less variety in the layouts of the apartments, which has led some researchers to suggest that the architect is pushing residents out of uncomfortable dwellings into the public spaces of Monte Amiata. Criticism also grows out of the comparison of a house for the living with a house for the dead - a necropolis, which at different levels is true for Rossi's work.
The vast and varied public spaces were to be combined, as in a real city, with commercial activity: shops and offices were planned on the ground floors of residential buildings, but most of these premises remained empty, including due to changes in the fate of Monte Amiata.
Aimonino and Rossi adhered to "leftist" beliefs, therefore, in their view, housing for the people should have become a rich, diverse, high-quality urban environment. The project of the complex differs sharply from the surrounding typical development, as it contains criticism of the "budget" approach of the Milan authorities and the Gescal housing fund (successor to INA-Casa), as well as modernism in the CIAM version. However, the intentions of architects, as often happens, came into conflict with socio-economic reality. After the completion of construction in 1972, the Monte Amiata company tried to sell the complex to the municipality, negotiations on a specific form of selling apartments dragged on, and in 1974 to the usual problems of new areas - undeveloped infrastructure, a weak transport system at a distance from the center, etc. - added a widely publicized episode of the "occupation" of empty buildings by students and workers of communist views. They were removed with the help of the police, and in the same year, Monte Amiata began to be populated (not without difficulty: demand remained small), but it turned from social to ordinary housing, was fenced and became, in fact, the opposite of the plan of its creators.
Over the decades, the necessary trade and public institutions have appeared in Gallaratese, a metro has been installed there, a new impetus for development can be given by the proximity of the territory of Expo 2015. “Monte Amiata” is now more than prosperous and well-groomed, about 1500 people live there; in the city newspaper, for example, it is reported about the opening of a library there by the house committee "for their own", and the increased interest in its buildings of architecture lovers from all over the world is restrained for the sake of the convenience of residents by various restrictive measures.
