Quinzii Terna Architecture

09/02/2026

The Oasis School #5

We are very happy that the preliminary project for the "Oasis School" has been validated by the Municipality of Milan.

The project, promoted by Legambiente and Loacker S.p.A., developed by QTA, in collaboration with Parco Nord Milano for the agronomic component, aims to permanently transform Via Sacchini into a linear garden in front of the Di Vona-Speri school, which is currently pedestrianised on an experimental basis through a tactical urban planning project.

We wanted to incorporate each step into an overall design vision, with the desirable goal of transforming the entire block around the school, finally providing an environment of naturalness, well-being, safety, and independence for the thousands of students who attend the school, and with the idea that a new vision of the city should also begin from the schools.

This first phase, funded by a specific donation, involves the creation of the basic green infrastructure of the new "Oasis" through a process of depaving and renaturalising of the street, carving out a series of green spaces in the existing asphalt, filled with diverse plant species and trees, like a small botanical garden.

This public space project demonstrates the complexity of a process that brings together public institutions, private entities, non-profit associations, schools, and citizens, working to coordinate the multiplicity of stakeholders and their desires, limitations, and expectations.

It also demonstrates the broad and cultural role the architect should have, who must respond to a community increasingly eager to participate in the city's transformation and provide solutions to the numerous unforeseen events and issues.

We believe that this participatory process that addresses the complexity is the right direction for redesigning public space.

03/02/2026

To live extensively – A new social housing neighbourhood in Podgorica

Competition for the conceptual urban and architectural design of a residential and commercial complex within the 'city housing' project in Podgorica (Montenegro)

Within a rigid, car-oriented masterplan, we propose a reversal of the urban concept that maximises lot sizes and the continuity and breadth of public space.

The design of a Social Housing project today cannot ignore the definition of a recognisable public space and community identity. The starting point of the project is therefore the creation of the largest, richest, and most continuous outdoor public space, allowing the new community to find new forms of socialisation, mutual understanding, and dialogue; a space that expands the concept of living, from strictly personal spaces to places of mutual sharing, enriching the lives of the families who will settle here.

Within this extensive green infrastructure, the courtyards enclosed by the buildings accommodate gathering spaces (such as squares and playgrounds) and functions dedicated to residents and the neighbourhood.

The buildings reconstruct the alignments along the main roads, establishing themselves as elements of urban order within the highly informal public space: a continuous portico characterises the ground floor dedicated to services and common areas.

The distribution of the residential spaces follows a basic module, which becomes the organising element of the façades: the elevations of the new buildings are thus characterised by great geometric rigor, enriched by string courses that reduce the scale of the project, accommodating the human scale in the large quantities of space required while maintaining, at the same time, an extreme richness of detail, reminiscent of ancient European social housing projects.

The ground floor forges an emotional bond with the city of Podgorica, clad in pebbles from the Morača River, drawing on ancient local architecture while also paying homage to more modern examples, such as the Podgorica Hotel.

Credits
Urban and Architectural Design: QTA
With Dragana Mikavica Bernabè 
Collaborators: Suchada Shovityakool
Images and Model:  QTA

23/07/2025

After mortgaging the city's surface, skewing the use of public space towards the omnipresence of cars and ubiquitous asphalt, we have also committed the subsoil to infrastructure, systems, and distribution.

But trees and water (which re-emerges in Milan with springs), elements that we so desperately need today to combat climate change, live between these two worlds and know full well that they are one and the same: the world above nourishes the world below and vice versa.

If in 1986 Bernardo Secchi theorised the need for a “soil project” – an indispensable return to designing the space between things – today, in addition to this, we must envisage a “subsoil project”, finding a balance between technological and natural flows, giving space back to nature and our symbiotic relationship with the ground.

The renaturalisation project in Via Sacchini started with a survey of what exists above and below the ground: it found land invaded by infrastructures (and the buffer zones around them), arranged according to criteria valid for each individual infrastructure, but without an overall project to rationalise the presence of pipes, corrugated pipes and manholes.

This irrationality makes the project - and the possibility of finding “holes” where nature can re-emerge and new trees can be planted - difficult, but not impossible. By geometrically overlapping and intersecting the constraints, a small space has been left. Here, trees will be able to grow and spread their roots without intersecting with existing systems, and the balance between above and below will change in favour of multiple uses and biological presences.

Climate change and urban heat islands require radical and systematic de-paving (de-bituminisation) and re-vegetation: with the research Milan Public Space, we have surveyed the city's open spaces; now we must broaden our gaze to what is happening underground!

gaia

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Diego Terna

09/07/2025

Many thanks to urdesign

09/06/2025

Today we are happy to share one of our last works, the restoration of an ancient chocolate factory (and then workshop, cultural association, coworking, bicycle repair) in a new bistro/pub, in the north part of Milan.

The place has built an identity made of additions, reuses, discoveries, and stratifications that have left continuous traces, like rings in a tree trunk, but without ever completely losing its original spatiality of a large, tall, and bright volume, which characterized the factory.

We decided to propose an addendum to this sum, trying to put order in the required functions and showing all the scars of the time experienced by this architecture. The new layout embraces the interior space with warm materials (wood and fibrous insulating panels), which lower the noise threshold, attenuate the peaks, work on the large volume of air enclosed by the walls to make eating, drinking, chatting, and watching a show more comfortable, accentuating the multifunctionality of the place, allowing different co-habitations of the space: the backs of the benches are deep and allow for the positioning of plants, particularly loved by the managers and their green fingers. These can grow by climbing the grates behind which the acoustic panels are fixed, grates that can also be used as equipped walls for small exhibitions that welcome young local artists.

The red color recalls the color of the original finishes of the windows and skylights: everything revolves around a neon still produced in the outskirt of Milan, a neon of those now replaced by LEDs, but which still wants to link the ancient time of the chocolate factory with our contemporaneity, reiterating the name of the place, Hug, and perhaps the concept of space, an embrace in the frenetic Milan.

Concept, Architecture Design, Furniture Design: Quinzii Terna Architecture ( )
Collaborator: Weixi Yan
Graphic design: .cocozza
Photos:

20/05/2025

The oasis school #3

In a public space project there are many "clients", starting from those who live and use a space the most, but also those who live in the neighborhood and in the city, the occasional users, the Municipality, the associations, the private individual who perhaps finances the redevelopment…

Opening our work and sharing it with this multiple client base, bringing it directly into the public space, addressing questions, doubts and direct criticisms is a challenge that we believe is necessary to face.

So, last Saturday, thanks to that coordinated the event with many other associations in the neighborhood, we gladly contributed to the promoted by the Municipality of Milan and involved everyone in a great game – an experiment that we hope will soon become reality.

After the 3 workshops with the school students, we summarized a catalog of possible spaces that is basically a program. 

On Saturday, after gathering more criticism and suggestions (what do you like? what you don't like? what would you like?), we asked everyone to create their own program and try to place it on a large 1:200 scale model of the road and finally to vote for their favorite element.

Many thanks to
gaia



ursu.7505

25/03/2025

The Oasis School project continues,
together with the school users!

Last Friday we helped to organize three critical insights:

1. We dialogued with secondary school girls and
to better understand how they use the space around the school and what they will need more to live it as a safe and pleasant place.

2. Meanwhile, elementary school kids played a card game created by AMAT to show us how they prefer to play in the open public space, which actions such as jumping, balancing, or hiding they would like to “perform” around their school.

3. with installed a device on the school window capable of analyzing the flows along Porpora Street and providing children, teachers, and everyone else with essential data to improve mobility around the school.

The workshops have been possible thanks to the school principal and professor and Luca Bonfiglio


del.pretemeggetto gaia
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Demetrio Scopelliti

26/01/2025

We are happy to share a bunch of images that we took during a workshop with primary and secondary school students in Milan.

This is the first step of a new project - in which we immediately wanted to involve the school, the municipality and many exceptional tutors who work on these issues and care about the city.
We will work on the transformation of the streets around the school into a new public space.

The workshop “Open your eyes/Close your eyes. Maps of the public space while we are at school” was meant to be students' first introduction to the dimensions, speeds, textures, temperatures, and existing green elements of the school's surroundings: we encouraged them to explore the space and understand that we should observe our city with new eyes.

After this moment of spatial investigation, we asked them to close their eyes and imagine a new space around their school.

The workshop has been possible thanks to
the school principal
Luca Bonfiglio



del.prete meggetto
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Francesca Garzilligaia

Marina Reissner

Gloria Pellone


(and the students of the Master in New Urban Design)

10/01/2025

Le risorse dello spazio pubblico 

Presentazione del libro Milan Unlocked. Lo spazio pubblico dopo la pandemia e dibattito 

16 Gennaio 2024, 18:00-19:30, Triennale Milano, Agorà

La ricerca Milan Unlocked ha analizzato i cambiamenti avvenuti nelle politiche, nei comportamenti e negli spazi urbani di Milano a seguito della Pandemia del 2020-21, in comparazione con altre città internazionali. Dopo una grande slancio, sembra notarsi una difficoltà a trasformare in politiche strutturate e con visione a lungo termine molte delle politiche temporanee intraprese. 

Come sblocchiamo Milano, come sblocchiamo lo spazio pubblico oggi?

Per riqualificare e ripensare lo spazio pubblico ci vogliono risorse, economiche e umane. Ci vogliono idee, ci vuole una cultura generale che consideri lo spazio pubblico il bene comune della città e ne valuti il valore di grande regolatore sociale, decidendo di investire su questo.

L’incontro prende come spunto la nuova pubblicazione “Milan Unlocked” per sollecitare un dibattito su come realmente sbloccare il progetto dello spazio pubblico della città. 



Public space resources

Presentation of the book “Milan Unlocked. Public space after the pandemic” and debate

January 16th 2024, 18:00-19:30, Triennale Milano, Agorà

The Milan Unlocked research analyzed the changes that occurred in the policies, behaviors and urban spaces of Milan following the 2020-21 Pandemic, in comparison with other international cities. After a great momentum, it seems that there is a difficulty in transforming many of the temporary policies into structured policies with a long-term vision.

How do we unblock Milan, how do we unblock public space today?

To redevelop and rethink public space, we need resources, both economic and human. We need ideas, we need a general culture that considers public space the common good of the city and evaluates its value as a great social regulator, deciding to invest in this.

The meeting takes the new publication “Milan Unlocked” as a starting point to solicit a debate on how to really unblock the project of the city's public space.

06/01/2025

16/10/2024

A Room of One's Own.

A small room like a mobile device, a niche where one can retreat or decides to share experiences.
The room for a child who is becoming a girl; there is still playing, together with studying, secrets, sport: a small expanding world.

Client: Private commission
Location: Milan (IT)
Year: 2023
Collaborators: Weixi Yan
Photographies: QTA

15/07/2024

Milano 2020, subito dopo il primo lockdown, due ragazzi giocano a badminton usando le linee della pavimentazione esistente, integrando il disegno del campo con dei tratti fatti con la farina.

Milano 2022, proponiamo alla scuola, alle associazioni e al comune di trasformare la nuova piazza scolastica di via Sacchini in un grande playground in cui includiamo anche un campo di badminton blu.

Milano 2024, due ragazzi giocano nel campo da badminton blu in via Sacchini, due ragazze giocano a pallavolo nel parterre di via Pacini liberato dal parcheggio abusivo, una ragazza gioca a tennis contro il muro della piazzetta San Materno definitivamente pedonalizzata dopo la fine dell’emergenza pandemica.

Milano, 17 Luglio 2024, a Palazzo Morando ore 18:00 parleremo delle osservazioni svolte durante e dopo la pandemia sullo spazio pubblico di Milano in comparazione con altre città internazionali e in dialogo con esperti, raccolte nel nuovo libro che abbiamo pubblicato per finanziato da Milano Urban Center. 
La presentazione sarà all'interno dell'evento "Prospettive Urbane" in collaborazione con

Il libro riporta sulla copertina la foto (di ) dei due giocatori di badminton nel 2020.