Before Isola Design District, there was just Isola

Isola literally means “island”

Open your eyes and you expect to be surrounded by trees, and instead feels overhung by trees, hung on the terraces of a skyscraper that tells about innovation and sustainability.

On following, another building responds in an hi-tech language, in a landscape that transmits at the same time progress and contrast.

But it is the vitalistic coexistence of realities in contrast, one of the main distinguishing features of the Isola: respect [or in spite] of other areas of the city.

In fact, the Isola area, the old and the new will not clash, but blend going to create added value in a clear process of gentrification dedicated to conserving the origins and the achievement of a balanced dialogue between how much is left and what is born to stay.

And from here, perhaps, our experience, the encounter of an urban fabric that is really an island, and where the wreck becomes a metaphor, at this point, for the discovery of a space, due to something known, but which it is still new.

[5 facts you need to know about the new Isola Design District]

Isola is a place for design masters

The district developed between the second half of the ‘800 and the first of the ‘900 and owes its name to the construction of the railway in 1865 that divided and isolated, in fact, the neighborhood from the rest of the city.

So it is not the water, but the railway that makes Isola as an island.

Today, Isola is a neighborhood that has maintained a “flavor” old, with narrow streets, and voluntarily speed limited traffic.

Many architects of the “Milanese rationalism” such as Terragni, Lingeri, Griffini, Manfredi, Baldessari and Giò Ponti have expressed here in the thirties, paving the way for contemporary experiences such as the Vertical Forest and Unicredit Tower and Pavillion designed by great architects like Stefano Boeri, César Pelli and Michele De Lucchi.

It is not only the architecture of the masters that characterizes the urban development of the neighborhood.

Just a few steps to be fascinated by the beautiful Art Nouveau buildings and the tenements with courtyards that protect introverted dynamics of life of the neighborhood.

There is no traffic, people around is easy. Bars, restaurants and historical places like Frida and the Blue Notes are true meeting places, such as in the countries.

Away from dictates 

Isola is a multifaceted district, almost impossible to fully comprehend for those who are not rooted.

But for its morphological characteristics, which make it a fledged district, that we breathe is an air of authenticity, a value to recover and develop, away from the dictates of contemporary innovation sometimes standardized, an innovation that It adds rather than simplifying it firmly anchored to design methods of institutions.

And that is why we are here, where the cultural ferment grows every day, and where every day too exist a trade between traditional crafts and entertainment, so good design can take roots, to return to Milan as a design speaking city not only during a week in early spring.

Because, after all, quoting and paraphrasing Enzo Mari:

“the best designer is the one who plants a [not vertical] forest of chestnut, not doing it for himself, but does so for their grandchildren.”