“(Milan) is a stimulating city to work in, ugly, but not provincial. You never meet anyone. That's its great advantage: it’s solitary. The same sort of solitude that pervades New York.”

Vico Magistretti, 1980

The call for tenders had specified the need for each of the two main activities of the Institute, teaching and research, to be split into two practical areas. These spaces are marked out by the dialectics between the tall volumes housing the departments and laboratories, interconnected and laid out in a semicircle around an atrium which serves as a link between the different disciplinary areas, and the lower volumes, largely occupied by the lecture theatres.

Fulvio Irace, Vanni Pasca, Vico Magistretti Architetto e Designer, Electa, 1999

“Simplicity does not mean a total lack of decoration but of superimposed decoration.” V.M.