Firm： Design International

Type： Commercial › Retail Shopping Mall

STATUS： Built

YEAR： 2016

SIZE： 500,000 sqft - 1,000,000 sqft

IL CENTRO, opened on the 14th April 2016 in Milan, Italy, and is the largest shopping centre built in one single phase in Italy, with 92,000 sqm of GLA and boasting over 200 shops, cafés, restaurants, outdoor as well as indoor sport, cultural and health activities.

The centre attracts visitors from one of the most affluent and wealthiest populations across North Milan, the Lakes and Switzerland, with over 8 million within one hour reach. But what makes IL CENTRO unique and different is that it is not just a shopping centre - typically a hermetic and decontextualized “retail box”. Instead, it is a permeable street with indoor buildings, indoor and outdoor squares, porticos, gates and gardens.

The centre was designed by a consortium of notorious architects including Arch. Michele de Lucchi, Arch. Arnaldo Zappa and, the most recent addition, of Arch. Davide Padoa of Design International. Davide Padoa was brought in to ensure the visitor experience will be on par with such stunning retail and leisure environments as the famous Morocco Mall in Casablanca, or Cleopatra Mall, currently under construction in Cairo, both award-winning projects of architecture firm Design International.

Along with real trees, different plazas with their own identity, a ramp resembling that of the Guggenheim in New York City and a roof supported by one of the largest glulam structures in Europe, which capitalizes on the tradition of covered city streets like Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, IL CENTRO is also the most sustainable large scale shopping centre ever designed in Italy, which is designed according to strict criteria of energy saving and bio-sustainability, in line with the standards promoted by the U.S. Green Building Council to achieve the prestigious LEED ® Gold level certification.