Palace storm damage highlights need to plan maintenance

The Palazzo Fidia, a 1932 residential building of great architectural interest in central Milan, suffered severe damage during a storm that hit the city in July 2023.

The rare but destructive weather event – which scientists and weather forecasters have termed a 'medicane' or Mediterranean hurricane  – felled thousands of trees and caused tens of millions of euros worth of damage.

The 2023 medicane is illustrative of dangers the city can anticipate as the climate changes. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour and, although there may be fewer precipitation events, each will hit the city more intensely and violently.

According to Milan's local climate profile the future is likely to see both longer droughts and an increase in severe thunderstorms that could cause flooding and damage greater than the 2023 medicane.

Architects Archpiuditre also analysed the facades after some materials fell off before July 2023 when the medicane took place, and recommended action on the basis of RICS' Planned preventative maintenance of commercial and residential property professional standard.

Meanwhile, the superintendency – the local council of the Ministry of Culture that monitors the property – made other recommendations following ad hoc inspections.

Despite these warnings, only a small portion of the various recommendations were carried out during pilot restoration works in 2022.

This project focused on the eighth floor and ornamental arches at the top of the building on the east wing. It was designed to test technical approaches that could be replicated across the building, in particular mortars in the brick courses and the structure of the projections.

However, it was also intended to put pressure on the owners by highlighting the degradation of the building and the need for overall restoration work.

It was the restored portion of the eighth floor that managed to resist the force of the wind – which reached speeds of more than 100 km/h – and the heavy rainstorm that accompanied it in 2023. The rest of the building, however, was extensively damaged.

Functional and decorative elements of the roofing were especially badly affected, being the most fragile and more exposed to the force of the wind. This included the roof of a veranda, the wooden guglia – that is, its high sloping roof, which crowned the condominium stairwell – and an old chimney that also supported the latter.

Firefighters intervened as a matter of urgency to secure the unstable parts, and prevent rainfall from worsening the already extensive damage to the interior of the top floors of the building.

In particular – with the aid of an aerial platform – they removed pieces of roofing that were only partially anchored to the structure, cordoned off the area on the ground that was closed to the passage of people and vehicles due to the risk of further collapse, and removed a portion of the seventh floor roof gutter.

Later interventions were carried out by a building company specialising in work at height, although in some places there was no certainty of support for provisional structures, and action had to be taken quickly without tendering for suppliers.

There were also significant problems in arranging aerial platforms and crane trucks for access, given that hundreds of other buildings in the city also required repairs.

However, the restoration work has paradoxically benefited from a direct view of the internal structures, including the cavities between the roof and the ceiling of the flat below with the relative support structures of both, and the roofs that the storm damage had exposed.

This has helped accelerate the design process but has also meant a greater need for replacements and additional parts than would be typical for conservative restoration interventions.

Archpiuditre and the condominium manager compared the cost of restoring these parts under ordinary conditions, as part of the general restoration project already approved by the superintendency, and those paid under necessarily emergency conditions.

This found that the costs of the latter were around four times those of the former, at €360,000 rather than €90,000.

Only €130,000 of this was reimbursed by insurers, because the insured value of the building did not correspond to its actual value.

The building had been appraised in a very superficial way by the properties, before it was listed by the superintendency and then never revalued. This was due to an omission during the transition from one condominium administration to the next. The insurers also found that inadequate maintenance had contributed to the damage.

In addition, the allocation of these expenses between the owners of the individual flats in the building led to legal disputes, and the premium for the condominium insurance policy – the cost of which is divided between each of the flat owners – increased when it was renewed.

The medicane has also resulted in the loss of some of the building's original architectural elements, including the wooden structure of the roof of the seventh-floor veranda.

Although the restoration of the damage has now been completed, there are already issues with rainwater infiltration through the terraces. The owners are discussing how to deal with this, but legal disputes are also ongoing.

The college has drawn attention to the fact that pieces of its roof were blown two blocks away, and it was only because the medicane took place at night that injuries were prevented.

At a broader level, we campaign for the preservation of the city's architectural and artistic heritage, and have assessed the direct economic damage to property affected by extreme weather phenomena.

In this case, for example, fragments of the palace broke the glass of an adjacent building's staircase as well as damaging a car and other private property.

There have also been indirect economic impacts; for instance, the palace had been used in the past for fashion shoots, but since the storm all of these have had to be cancelled. More generally, there has been a sharp overall increase in the costs of insuring against extreme weather events in the city.

The palace therefore serves as an example of the need for scheduled maintenance plans in accordance with RICS standards – particularly in areas vulnerable to more intense weather as the climate changes.