The Milan Olympics Village That Will Become Student Housing: SOM's Most Ambitious Adaptive Reuse Project

The Milan Olympics Village That Will Become Student Housing: SOM's Most Ambitious Adaptive Reuse Project

When the 2026 Winter Olympics end in Milan, 1,700 athletes' beds become student housing within months. The Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed village in a former rail yard is the most consequential argument yet for designing infrastructure that outlasts the event it was built for.

The relationship between major international sporting events and the cities that host them has produced some of architecture's most celebrated failures. The Olympic village built for the Athens 2004 Games became a ghost town within years of the closing ceremony. Montreal's Olympic Stadium — the "Big O" — was still paying off its debt thirty years after the 1976 Games. The pattern is consistent enough that "Olympic white elephant" has become a category in urban planning literature, describing purpose-built facilities that cannot find a viable use once the event they were designed for concludes.

Milan's approach to the 2026 Winter Olympics offers a different model — one that architectural critics and urban planners are watching as a potential template for how major events should think about their physical legacy.

The design that makes the conversion possible

In Milan, Italy's most expensive rental market, architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has designed an Olympic Village that can convert into an affordable 1,700-bed student residence within months of the closing ceremony. Many athletes' facilities — spaces for socializing, recreation, and fitness — are needed by students too. There is so much overlap that Italian real estate developer Coima promises to have it ready in time for the fall 2026 semester. CNN

The architectural logic is worth examining in detail because it represents a design approach — building for the second use from the beginning, not retrofitting — that is rarer than it should be.

The main athlete's village, designed by SOM, will transform into student housing after Milano Cortina 2026 winds down, while the Santagiulia arena will later play host to concerts. In addition to designing six new buildings, the architects restored two historic structures on the site, a former rail yard. Azure Magazine

The former rail yard site is significant not only as a brownfield redevelopment — replacing contaminated industrial land with residential and institutional use — but as an urban regeneration project that uses the Olympics as the catalyst for a transformation that the city's planning agenda had identified as necessary but that lacked the funding mechanism and political urgency that a major international event provides.

Why student housing is the right second use

The alignment between athlete accommodation requirements and student housing requirements is not obvious until you examine the specific spatial needs of both programs. Olympic athletes need: individual sleeping rooms with en-suite bathrooms for privacy and recovery; communal dining facilities that can handle high volumes efficiently; fitness and rehabilitation spaces; social areas for team bonding and inter-nation exchange; and secure perimeter management for the duration of the Games.

University students need: individual sleeping rooms (ideally en-suite for contemporary market expectations); dining facilities; fitness infrastructure; social common rooms; and academic support spaces. The overlap is substantial — more substantial than the overlap between athlete accommodation and, for example, hotel conversion, which requires the addition of reception infrastructure, amenity programming, and a hospitality service model that the Olympic village format does not support.

The broader context: adaptive reuse as the most important architectural practice of the 21st century

The Milan Olympic Village is one instance of a broader shift in how the architecture profession and its clients are thinking about the relationship between new construction and existing building stock.

The Unipol Forum in Assago, usually a basketball and concert stadium, has been reinvented as the Milano Ice Skating Arena for the duration of the Olympics. Adaptation continues to be the name of the Games when it comes to new construction. Azure Magazine

This adaptation-first approach reflects a convergence of sustainability imperatives, economic pressures, and a growing recognition that the embodied carbon already invested in existing structures represents a resource that demolition and replacement wastes. The carbon cost of demolishing a building and replacing it with a new one — even an energetically efficient new one — typically takes decades to amortize. Adaptive reuse, by contrast, preserves the embodied carbon while updating the functional and energetic performance of the structure.

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