IN 1877, construction crews were hard at work in the historic center of Milan, where a startlingly new structure was rising next to the gothic cathedral: the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a vast, vaulted arcade of shops and restaurants just off the Piazza del Duomo. The project embodied many of the key tenets of the burgeoning modernist movement. Its soaring glass canopies were held in place by cast-iron ribs, for example, making use of innovative material and structural technologies and creating a new type of building with little precedent. The designers also took a modern stance toward their