Twenty years of Green Rays in Milan: a retrospective that looks to the future
In the evocative setting of the Wunderkammer, today we inaugurate the exhibition celebrating the first twenty years of Milan's Green Rays (2003-2023).
The exhibition refers to the lively process of transformation of Milan’s capital city that began in the 1980s when the disused industrial sites in some central areas made way for innovative development plans and territorial regeneration. These are the foundations of the Green Rays project, born in 2003 to provide Milan, a pioneer city in urban ecology, with a sustainable model.
Two years later, in 2005, with the Associazione Interessi Metropolitani (AIM), the ‘Green Rays for Milan’ strategic master plan was drawn up. An initiative animated by a disruptive spirit, which can also be perceived in the manifesto of the exhibition, curated by architect Erica Boncaldo and art director Raikhan Musrepova.
The exhibition’s central theme is the city’s evolution into a greener urban landscape, a concept that goes beyond mere aesthetics. The ‘Let’s Break Up‘ project embodies the desire to go beyond the traditional vision of urban decency, promoting a change of mentality that integrates ethical and aesthetic models. The connection between nature, culture and architecture is at the heart of this evolution, a philosophy that has accompanied Green Rays for over twenty years.
Projects such as Bicocca, Pompo Leoni, Maserati, Portello, and Porta Nuova are interwoven like a spider’s web, reflecting the importance of relationships in an age where they exceed the nodes. The image of Milan as a large urban landscape, the ‘Green-Blue,’ is further enriched by adding the third dimension: the ground. The Loreto Open Community project, the latest in the series, goes deeper, bringing to the surface and regenerating the urban soil of Piazza Loreto, making it a tangible testimony to the new urban ecology.
“The exhibition ’20 years of Green Rays’ at the Wunderkammer represents a further step in a strategy started at the beginning of the century in the Milanese landscape and is part of an initiative bound to gather in a single exhibition space the best projects and developments of the areas we have renovated in the course of more than three decades of the firm’s activity,” says Andreas Kipar. “A crucial milestone on the timeline of LAND’s history, always open to constant evolution, is now the subject of an exhibition, available to landscape architects, urban planners and architects, but also to Milanese people interested in the sustainable future of their city.“
The Green Rays project is described as a “dream project,” in which each individual can light, walk, or even adopt a ray, connecting the city from one side to the other.
