Together with Generali Real Estate and Mondadori Group, CRA renews the Mondadori Office Playground within its Oscar Niemeyer’s Palazzo Mondadori into a dynamic Playground Workspace in Italy. The renovation brief was to provide a much-needed fully reconfigurable working environment by using modern furniture merged with innovative design. It was led by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, collaborating with the late Italo Rota and Maestro Technologies for the Milan-based building—one of Niemeyer’s masterpieces and seat for Mondadori Group, Italy’s biggest book publisher.

Mondadori Office Playground’s Design Concept:

The design retains Niemeyer’s original vision but incorporates progressive workplace strategies. It initially encompassed over 20,000 square meters and marked the first phase of a more extensive renovation program for this iconic European landmark. More than 1,300 units from the building’s original modular furniture by Swiss manufacturer USM were refurbished by CRA, in collaboration with Maestro Technology, to include wood and add modules to be reconfigured to provide spaces for plants, thus allowing nature into the office environment.

“Leaving behind our pajama comfort zone of Zoom calls, the office will have to be more like a playground,” opines Carlo Ratti, founding partner of CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati. “Ditch the old cubicle-compartmentalized thinking that gets in the way of innovation and encounters. Exchanges in physical space are essential and exploit an ever-configuring environment greatly.”
It has provided desks in the renovated area for casual meetings on all five floors, while new transparent meeting rooms give a feeling of continuity and relation with the outdoors. The scheme has been laid out to make full use of natural light, showing the palace in its full glory in complete harmony with the park next to it. One of Niemeyer’s poetic designs is Palazzo Mondadori, whose suspended glass box is supported by parabolic arches, which gives an illusion of floating above an artificial lake designed by Pietro Porcinai. CRA was required to update the office spaces to today’s innovative standards, showing respect for the building’s cutting-edge design of those times in the 1970s.

The Mondadori Group’s offices are the latest in a long chain of studies by CRA about the future workspace: working spaces that encourage meaningful interactions. This project joins notable examples, such as CapitaSpring in Singapore, awarded “Best Tall Building, Asia, 2023,” and is one of ArchDaily’s Buildings of the Year for 2023 because of its vertical urbanism and green space integration. Other workspace projects by leading architectonics companies include the Fondazione Agnelli in Torino, the Zambon headquarters in Milan, and the complex ILOW for Bouygues at La Défense in Paris.
CRA has also been closely linked to Oscar Niemeyer’s heritage. In 2020, the studio created the master plan for the new Biotic district in Brasilia—a dynamic area dedicated to technology and innovation criteria initially foreseen by Niemeyer and Lucio Costa.

Project Info:

• Architects: Carlo Ratti Associati, Italo Rota, Maestro Technologies
• Country: Milan, Italy
• Year: 2024

• Photographs: DSL Studio: Delfino Sisto Legnani, Melania Delle Grave