Benedetto Croce said, about Pinocchio, that what the wood was made of “was humanity”. Wood is life, it is the breath of a city of concrete and a step towards environmental sustainability. This is precisely the reason that led Rubner Haus, the Bolzano group that made wooden constructions its trademark, to choose it for one of its latest creations: “Rubner News Haus“, a small newsstand in the heart of Milan, not far from Cadorna station and a few steps from Duomo, the center of the metropolis.
“Today there is a lot of talk about urban regeneration as a tool to give back to the community assets that have a positive effect on the values of social inclusion and integration”, underlined Deborah Zani, CEO of the group. “The newsstand is just that: a place without doors or windows overlooking a square, an emblem at the center of exchanges and relationships”. Environmental sustainability, living sustainability and ethical-cultural sustainability, the keywords underlying the project that Rubner Haus set up together with the architects Barban and Cappellari of Vicenza. “We started working on this project at the end of 2019“, said Flavio Barban at the end of the inauguration. “We thought we could conclude everything a few months ago, but the pandemic forced us to extend the time“.
A project started in “times of peace” which continued in “times of war”, at a time when the newsstand became the reference point for the inhabitants of the neighborhood, locked up in their homes and who found a face friend right in your newsagent. “During the lockdown we realized how important this place was still for the community. People came to buy a newspaper or a magazine and my wife and I had the only friendly faces outside the family”, said Omar Decimati, the owner of the newsstand.
An opening wooden hut as the symbol of a place that contains a hidden treasure in it, the red thread between past and future, between a paper world and its virtual evolution, to remind everyone that the human bond can go beyond a screen . From wood to wood, a circle that closes in a ring composition with a romantic flavor that combines history and eco-sustainability, given the lightness and ability of wood to reduce the presence of Co2 in the air. “Building with wood means respecting the environment and giving back to the community a self-healing asset that is naturally grafted into the urban fabric“, concluded Deborah Zani, before cutting the ribbon and reviving the newsstand.
We started with Benedetto Croce, we close with Alda Merini, who Milan knew well. “The word of wood it is not uniform, it is a polyphony”, he said. A polyphony, the symbol of a wooden newsstand from which the voices of an entire city come out.
