740_VIASOLARI

The First People’s Quarter of the Società Umanitaria, or in its initial name, the workers’ quarter of Via Solaro, is a public housing complex in Milan built in record time, from April 1, 1905 to the end of March 1906 by the Società Umanitaria to a design by architect Giovanni Broglio.

The district, built to coincide with the great 1906 Milan International Exposition, is spread over a single block in the area then known as “Porta Macello” in Porta Genova, between Via Solari (then Via Solaro), Via Stendhal, Via Osvaldo Viani and Via Moisè Loria in what is now Milan’s Municipality 6. Consisting of 240 apartments including studios, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments, it was put in place in April 1905 and delivered on March 29, 1906.

The architecture of the neighborhood is defined as minor art nouveau, which cannot present the elaborate decorations of the grand bourgeois art nouveau mansions of the time.

The subject buildings are severely deteriorated both externally and internally; the dwellings have surfaces of all rooms no longer adequate to meet the minimum levels required by the R.E.