ICONIC ARCHITECTURE: The Games pass, architecture remains

The Olympic Village in Milan

The 2026 Iconic Architecture series by ARCHITECT@WORK explores the value of visual language in architecture, namely, the ability to make what often remains implicit fully understandable, without the need for captions. Thus, the image becomes a tool for interpretation, revealing the meaningful core of a project even before it is described.
In this sense, architecture no longer needs too many words. Form, space, and the relationship with context construct an independent narrative, one that makes itself understood even before it is explained.

Recovering a readable visual dimension means restoring complexity to the project and placing the experience of those who observe and move through the space back at the center. The individual and their sensitivity become interpretative instruments, allowing room for emotions and even a certain degree of instinctiveness.

The architecture created for the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics is situated within this framework. Not as isolated objects but as interventions capable of communicating through urban design, scale, and time. Among them, the Milan Olympic Village offers a particularly meaningful interpretative key, experienced firsthand - more unconsciously than consciously - by its first users: the athletes who, over the exhilarating days of the Games, kept us holding our breath and filled our hearts with emotion.

The Milan Olympic Village was created as part of the transformation of the Porta Romana former railway site, one of the largest urban regeneration projects currently underway in Milan. Designed by the international firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), selected through an international competition, the project interprets the Olympic event as an opportunity to build a new fragment of the city, one intended to endure well beyond the duration of the Games.

The masterplan includes six newly constructed residential buildings, along with the refurbishment of several existing industrial structures that are integrated into the new urban layout. The volumes follow an immediately legible configuration, one that ties together space, functionality, and perception. Public spaces, pedestrian pathways, and green areas are not isolated episodes but a continuous sequence that guides the gaze and orients one’s experience of the space.
The scale of the interventions is measured and coherent with the Milanese context. No monumental elements or oversized gestures emerge. Instead, the project works through controlled repetition, the alignment of façades, and a constant relationship between solids and voids. It is a regularity that does not seek effect, but builds recognizability over time.

During the Winter Games, the Village hosted athletes and delegations. After the event, the buildings will be converted into residences primarily intended for student housing, complemented by collective spaces, services, and neighborhood functions. This transformation is not a later adaptation but a design condition explicitly stated from the outset. The future use does not correct the project: it confirms it in its natural evolution.

From a typological and spatial‑distribution standpoint, the complex is designed to respond to multiple needs. The housing units can adapt to different configurations, while the common areas and building systems allow for targeted adjustments without invasive interventions. Flexibility is not entrusted to extraordinary solutions, but to a well‑designed structure.

A central role is entrusted to the public space and the ground floors. The building podiums do not simply host entrances; they function as interfaces between architecture and the city. Pathways, courtyards, and open spaces are designed to be crossed, used, inhabited, even after the event has ended. It is here that the project truly begins to engage with everyday life and with the need to make architecture something that can be experienced and appreciated through sight and the other senses.

The landscape design, developed by Michel Desvigne, is an integral part of the urban scheme. The green areas, courtyards, and squares do not play a decorative role; they contribute to the spatial and environmental quality of the project. The landscape works on the microclimate, on perception, and on the slow rhythms of everyday use.
From an energy and environmental standpoint, the Village adopts an integrated approach. Passive strategies, high‑efficiency systems, and solutions aimed at reducing life‑cycle emissions are incorporated from the outset. Here too, sustainability is not displayed but practiced as an ordinary part of the project.

The Milan Olympic Village is all about permanence - the event was only a trigger. The project, conversely, measures its true value at the moment when it ceases to be extraordinary and becomes part of the ordinary city. It is in this transition, silent yet decisive, that the architecture continues to make itself legible over time.