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“Yeah, this is going to be another big, ugly glass box. You want to make something out of it?” With that line, the artist Barney Tobey mocked the monotony of office buildings in a 1965 New Yorker cartoon. The scene could easily repeat itself today in Milan, where glass and concrete have reshaped the city.

Photo © Nicola Colella

Take Viale Scarampo, a major artery leading in and out of town. Decades ago, it housed the Alfa Romeo headquarters and Milan’s former trade fair grounds, both later replaced by new buildings. Variety or cacophony—it depends on your taste: three leaning towers by Isozaki, Libeskind, and Hadid now rise above Mario Bellini’s long enfilade of 1990s fair pavilions, flanked by an oversized Postmodern pediment and a crumpled roof. Just beyond this monumental urban gateway, the city quickly shifts into the more intimate atmosphere of its 20th-century grid.

It is against this backdrop that local firm Open Building Research (OBR) designed the new headquarters for BFF Bank, tasked with avoiding “another big, ugly glass box” while dealing with such a fragmented setting. The competition-winning scheme began with the classic Italian obsession with street alignments—here challenged by the metro line underneath, slicing across the site at an almost 45-degree angle. The solution was to split the project into two related but independent parts: an 8-story office block and a vast canopy.

Nearby are glazed towers by (from left to right) Daniel Libeskind, Arata Isozaki, and Zaha Hadid Architects. Photo © Martina Simonato

As luck would have it, from the street those columns also frame a nearby residential building of great design quality by Gian Paolo Valenti, a brilliant yet largely forgotten post-WWII architect.

The public art gallery on ground level features rotating exhibitions. Photo © Martina Simonato

The ground floor is open to the public: visitors can step into an exhibition gallery showing the bank’s art collection. Currently on display is the Italian artist Enrico Baj with his marvelous portrayals of Moloch, Satan, and Beelzebub for Milton’s Paradise Lost. The gallery is topped by a tilted slab that breaks the box—it is the floor plate of the glass-walled auditorium above, also facing the street.

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Bright yellow accents can be found in the main lobby (4) and on the office floors (3,5). Photos © Martina Simonato (3) Nicola Colella (3,5)

Upstairs, in the office realm (each floor spanning about 13,000 square feet), the atmosphere is corporate—open spaces, glass walls, meeting rooms, and the usual amenities. Yet the layouts have been wisely studied for visual permeability and spatial variety, while a vivid yellow stair disrupts the banal stacking of floors.

At the top, there is no CEO’s corner office but rather a restaurant, gym, and panoramic terrace for all employees. From here, one can catch the details of the almost 25,000 square feet of photovoltaic panels on the canopy, the glass fins shielding against solar glare, the double-height bioclimatic loggias, and more. Yet the gaze soon lifts toward the distant Alps, before returning to frame the cityscape below, where now a parish center with playing fields meets finance.

Photo © Marina Simonato

Photo © Nicola Colella

In a context dominated by self-referential architecture, OBR’s building seeks mediation. It does not reject the glass box, but bends it, hollows it, and sets it in dialogue with its surroundings—an attempt to refute Tobey’s bitter irony.