Cascina Merlata

The Recipe of the Pertica
Take a square plot, one hundred pertiche wide — that’s 65,451.79 square meters of potential. Scatter across it a variety of living forms: row houses, balcony-access dwellings, courtyard homes, linear blocks. To each, assign its own open space — a gesture that defines it. A loggia for shade, a terrace for views, a patio for air, a balcony for connection, a garden for grounding. Then, breathe life into the voids between: thread through shared green spaces that nurture the community — public gardens, collective orchards, sports fields, a patchwork of bike paths and shared mobility stations. Now, here comes the twist: compress it all into a plot six times smaller — just 10,633 square meters. Bring the houses together, close but not crowded. Stack them, fold them, intertwine them. Let each piece keep its own soul, its own breath of air, its own horizon of relationships. Add two underground levels for cars — out of sight, out of mind.
And there you have it: a vertical neighborhood, dense but vibrant, layered yet porous — a compact city within a city, grown from a rural measure of land.