Results: The Water Tower

Terraviva has officially released the complete list of awarded projects of the architecture contest entitled “The Water Tower”.

The competition invited architects and designers to reimagine the historic Water Tower in the heart of Milanino’s Garden City, transforming it into a vibrant and accessible space for people of all generations. The challenge called for a complete rethinking of both interior and exterior spaces, including flexible cultural rooms, coworking areas, exhibition zones, and a system of terraces and outdoor gathering spaces. Participants were encouraged to explore how such a landmark could serve as a reference point for the entire neighborhood, hosting events, creative activities, and community initiatives throughout the year. The aim was not simply to restore the tower, but to redefine its identity as an architectural catalyst for culture, innovation, and social connection.

The awarded proposals were recognized for their ability to balance innovation with respect for the existing structure. The jury highlighted projects that successfully restored vitality to the tower while maintaining its original character, often through the sensitive integration of vegetation and ecological systems that reinforced the site’s infrastructural memory. Other proposals stood out for their strong material identity and spatial coherence, using warm and tactile materials to create continuity across levels and generate inviting spaces for gathering and pause. Some designs distinguished themselves through a lighter architectural approach, introducing subtle structural elements that engaged in dialogue with the modernist character of the tower while expressing adaptability and transformation. Across all awarded works, a shared emphasis emerged on creating meaningful spatial experiences that reconnect the landmark with the community and its urban context.

Terraviva warmly congratulates all participants for their creativity and commitment, whose proposals have contributed to reimagining the Water Tower as a renewed symbol of collective life and cultural exchange.

The winners were selected by an international jury panel composed by:

• Lidia Arduino [Cusano Milanino, Italy] | Comune di Cusano Milanino
• Luciano Crespi [Milan, Italy] | Politecnico di Milano
• Lula Ferrari [Milan, Italy] | Lula Ferrari Studio
• Paolo Cesaretti [Florence/Milan, Italy] | pc-|< Paolo Cesaretti Arch-
• Matteo Scaltritti [Gallarate, Italy] | Semarchitettura
• Luana La Martina [Rotterdam, Netherlands] | MVRDV
• Michele Cassino [Cuneo Italy] | Studio 3Mark
• Letizia Melzi [Milan, Italy] | Tectoo

1st Prize

Water Flows
Findik, Betul Aniker, Pranav Kanhangad Kakkanath, Theodorus Raimundus Johannes van Duin
Netherlands

An Ode to Water Flows

Dear Neighbours, Do you remember when this tower mattered?

Not as an object we pass by, but as something that quietly sustained life around it. Today it stands still. But what if it could flow again?

This project begins with water. Rain is harvested, lifted back into the old tank, and then released slowly, moving down through planted systems, filtering, feeding, and transforming as it goes. You can see it, hear it, follow it. The tower becomes less of a building, more of a living cycle. Something you experience rather than just look at.

And what happens when water slows down?

People do too.

Around the tower, the ground opens into terraces, steps, and soft edges. Places to sit, to pause, to watch. Small pavilions appear lightly in the landscape as cafés, shaded tables, simple structures that don’t demand anything from you except your presence.

You might stop for a coffee.

Or just sit for a while.

Or run into someone you didn’t expect to see.

These little in-between moments, the ones that don’t need planning make your everyday life lively. The kind that slowly stitch a neighbourhood together.

Who finds a place here?

Maybe an elderly neighbour resting in the shade, watching the day unfold.

A group of teenagers moving between steps and water edges.

A parent keeping an eye on a child near the shallow pools.

Someone passing through, who decides to stay at the cafe, looking out through the tower’s windows. Or you cooling off in the pool after a long day’s work. And everyone who visits!

There isn’t one way to use this space. And that’s the point. The different levels allow things to happen at once. Quiet and active, slow and social, without one overtaking the other. Over the course of a day, the space shifts. It belongs to different people at different times.

Can something old feel alive again?

The tower is no longer just a memory of infrastructure. It becomes part of everyday life again – supporting water systems, yes, but also conversations, routines, and small encounters. It reconnects to the larger green corridor of the neighbourhood along Viale Luigi Buffoli, becoming one moment within a continuous landscape. A place you arrive at, pass through, and return to.

Not just a landmark.

But a place to be.

A place where water flows again. And maybe, where we do too!

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About the First Prize – MICHELE CASSINO – STUDIO 3MARK

“The concept is highly convincing and restores a renewed vitality to the site without compromising its original nature. In particular, the integration of vegetated systems is coherent and well aligned with the infrastructural memory of the site. Overall, it is a project that successfully balances ecological sensitivity and urban value in a harmonious and considered way.”

2nd Prize

Suspension Within
Khoa Vu, Erik Fichter, Hongye Wu
United States-Switzerland

SUSPENSION WITHIN

A New Civic Life Inside the Water Tower

Suspension Within reimagines the Milanino Water Tower not through additions to its protected exterior, but through a radical act of interior renewal: a new civic world suspended within the old. The proposal preserves the historic façade and the powerful existing structure, while inserting a lightweight prefabricated timber system that gathers the tower’s fragmented levels, programs, and movements into one coherent spatial experience.

The project is conceived as a space within a space: a suspended timber figure held inside the existing tower. Rather than treating adaptive reuse as a series of scattered insertions, the proposal introduces one holistic architectural gesture capable of transforming the entire building. This new structure threads through the tower, weaving community life, art and design, dance and performance into a continuous vertical sequence of rooms, platforms, niches, and thresholds. It gives the tower a double life: a daily civic interior for gathering, working, and socializing, and a seasonal cultural venue for exhibitions, events, and performances. It creates a new life inside the old: warm against concrete, precise against historic texture, intimate within monumentality.

The program weaves together community, café and bar, art and design, dance and performance. It is specific enough to give each level a strong identity, yet flexible enough to support continuous use throughout the day by children, students, families, professionals, local associations, older adults, and people with reduced mobility. In daily life, the tower becomes a place to work, read, meet, rehearse, rest, and socialize. During cultural seasons, it transforms into a vertical venue for exhibitions, performances, workshops, and gatherings, extending Milan’s culture of design, art, music, theater, and performance into Milanino.

At the heart of the project is a suspended cylindrical volume that opens the first floor and upper tower into one spatial experience. Visitors ascend through a slow spiral, moving between the new timber structure and the original concrete frame, eventually arriving beneath the historic water tank and dome-like structure. The tower’s former infrastructure becomes a new civic ritual: to enter, gather, climb, pause, look, and rediscover the city from within.

On the ground floor, an elliptical timber platform forms a café and bar environment: seating, communal table, display surface, and social edge. In the basement, the same elliptical geometry becomes an intimate dance and performance room, with an acoustic timber lining and poche spaces for storage and support. Outside, the front yard becomes an arrival plaza and outdoor café, while the rear yard is transformed into a stepped performance landscape connected to both the upper level and basement.

Built with economical strategy primarily from solid wood and plywood, with minimal steel support, the intervention is warm, low-carbon, prefabricated, and reversible. Suspension Within turns the Water Tower from an abandoned vertical relic into an inhabited cultural instrument: a monument that no longer only stands above the neighborhood, but belongs to it.

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About the 2nd Prize – LETIZIA MELZI – TECTOO

“A project with a strong and recognizable identity, where the use of wood as a warm and distinctive material is particularly appreciated. The spatial continuity between the different levels is also compelling, making the intervention coherent and unified as a whole, while creating spaces that invite people to pause and experience the place.”

3rd Prize

Tower of Air
Xinying (Kiesza) Li, Tianyang Sun
United States

TOWER OF AIR / TORRE DI AIRE

The basement and ground levels remain dedicated to theater, extending performances outward to a northern amphitheater and a regraded southern plaza.

A ramp on the northern façade provides universal access, while an open trench to the south brings light into the basement, spanned by a bridge from the plaza. These new paths are unified by a single gesture: a cabled steel mesh that wraps the historic façade. This veil provides safety through transparency, acting as a light, silent mask through which the stones breathe.

The interior finish is left raw, like a cave, and only finished with a gray plaster to match the concrete for bodily contact. While the lower floors engage the horizontal landscape, the upper three levels are carved into a vertical void. A fabric-wrapped “totem” is suspended from the primary beams, ascending into the dome of the water tower. This volume houses a café, bar, and gallery, culminating in a greenhouse at the summit. Steel gratings filter light down to the principal level, where an oculus offers a view from the theater below to the café above.

Services—restrooms and elevators—are concealed within large wooden “cabinets.” The legible intervention is thus reduced to two airy bodies: a shroud without and an organ within.

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About the 3rd Prize – PAOLO CESARETTI – PC-|< PAOLO CESARETTI ARCH-

“By outlining the pure spatial volume through the use of a simple metal mesh, the project inserts itself effectively into the modernist structure of the tower with an almost weightless presence. It creates a consistent dialogue between two eras: the functionalist poetics of béton brut and our own time, defined by adaptability and continuous transformation.”

Golden Mention

Pieno.
Ian Angeles Canlas, Alper Fatih Tepe, Selin Dank
Italy

Golden Mention

THE LIVING RESERVOIR: A VERTICAL LANDSCAPE WHERE WATER BECOMES FOOD, CULTURE, AND COMMUNITY
Georgina Standerwick, Warren Standerwick
United Kingdom