‘I went daily to the cathedral of Milan, that singular mountain that was torn out of the rocks of Carrara…’ Hans Christian Andersen
While its summit is constructed of glass rather than stone, Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, like the ‘singular mountain’ of the Duomo, is a construction of geological proportions. These two landmark edifices — one erected to the service of religion, the other to commerce — also share a defining polar quality in terms of scale: in the way the monumentality of the forms is everywhere counterpointed by the intricacy of the details that populate those forms.