The Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi is a well-known private school of economics in Milan. To mark its centenary in 2001, the university held a competition for the largest extension in its history. The “offices for a thousand professors” scattered about the surrounding area were to be united in a single complex. In addition, a divisible “aula magna”, a grand assembly hall with seating for 1,000 persons, was to be created, together with other lecture halls and conference spaces. The design by Grafton Architects is influenced by the model of a medieval market building, while the formal language is reminiscent of Italian modernism. Beneath the projecting assembly hall, the closed, large-scale sculptural form of the building opens in an extensively glazed foyer that affords a view of the newly created square and the city beyond. Set between a lower structure, with lecture halls, foyers and the auditorium, and an upper structure, consisting of suspended office tracts, the main axis forms a kind of filter between the university campus and the city. These two worlds are bound together by many different spatial relationships between inside and outside, upper and lower levels.