Columbus Clinic for the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of the Blessed Cabrini, Via Buonarroti 48

Milan

Realized works

A building designed before the war, and constructed afterward. Ponti had an ideal scheme for a clinic already in mind, born out of conversations with a famous surgeon, Mario Donati Architecture is a matter of mental lucidity and the capacity for coordination. Therefore we can learn from architects and non-architects. And he also had a basic principle in mind: a clinic should never look like a clinic, but like a house. Leaving the clinic, the patient will express his gratitude to the doctors and nurses, and to the architect too, who has thought about him as a human being. When the opportunity arose, with the Columbus Clinic, the ideal scheme was realized (rooms facing south, vertical communications and floor control at the heart, operating theatres to the north, connected directly to the heart. The principle of a non-clinical appearance was also applied: the rooms in the Columbus Clinic were each painted in a different colour, and had wooden, not metal furniture. In the maternity wing, each room had a balcony and a pergola. And in this case it was the architect who had to express his own gratitude to the client, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. The legendary founder of the order, the Blessed Cabrini, Mother Cabrini as she was called in the hospitals she founded in New York, inspired Ponti to write a book in 1946 with the title Ringrazio Iddio che le cose non vanno a modo mio, I thank God that things do not go my way, a saying of hers. It was to be another order of nuns, the Discalced Carmelites, that would give Ponti the opportunity to build, in 1958, his beloved Convent of Bonmoschetto in San Remo.