area 121 | industrial building

AEG’s Turbine factory, Alfeld on the Leine,  by Peter Behrens,  1908-1909 - photo by Roland Halbe

According to the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of architecture and town planning edited by Paolo Portoghesi, the term industrial architecture “is used to indicate (…) the architectural typology of buildings intended to “contain” a production plant (…).”
It is a matter of structures built to contain work spaces, and whose design is therefore determined by the logistics and the production requirements, while the theme of the living conditions and inhabitability of the space and the enjoyability of the environmental conditions of the workers is unfortunately seldom a central priority in the architectural design, which is usually conditioned by the requirements of the machines. It is to allow the latter to function that the building has been erected in the first place. Analogously, the factory – with few exceptions worthy of notice – appears impervious to the landscape around it and proves, despite the often gigantic dimensions of its own volumetric structure, incapable of building new ones. These complexes usually distinguish themselves by their absolute anonymity, which is a source of disillusionment and humiliation to the surroundings in the best cases, while they also represent a threat due to the emissions and waste of natural resources in the worst. Vice versa, precisely due to the territorial and geographic impact wielded by industrial architecture these buildings, caskets of technology and construction culture, examples of the level of development of a country on the same level as the society in which they play an essential role in the cycle of consumption and thus of costumes, should be designed more carefully and attentively than any other building, due to their role and potential influence on the context. It must however be stressed that, as compared to other types of edifices, industrial buildings can count on a relatively recent history and tradition; it is a matter of “constructions” that have been developed with the industrial revolution and that vaunt little more than three centuries in the most advanced countries, and a very recent past as of last century in countries where an economy based on agriculture and fieldwork has survived longer. An attentive reflection and evolution on the idea of the factory has therefore yet to be brought to accomplishment, and this would probably – if the extent of its interaction with the landscape were to be appreciated – produce extremely interesting effects in relation to the territory surrounding it.
It is not a matter of attributing, to these buildings, the ingenuous and totalizing vision associated with the experience of Futurism, especially in Italy in the early years of last century. Even if it would be worthwhile to remember some constructive and formal experiments with the realization of these “special works” envisioned by Chiattone and Sant’Elia and realized by the engineer Mattè Trucco in 1922 with the example of Fiat’s factory at the Lingotto in Turin; it is a matter of fundamental examples that have influenced the entire architectural production of the period. On the other hand, the industrial building, as the case of Peter Behrens’ AEG factory designed between 1909 and 1911 or the Fagus factory at Alfeld an der Leine in Germany designed by Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer in the same years, had already demonstrated its demiurgic and mediatic power, becoming icons of Modernism and of that functionalistic aesthetics/ethics that has oriented and completely conquered the theoretic and practical hypotheses of the historical avant-gardes. Unfortunately, that heroic and lost vision of work and capitalism, followed by very few exceptional examples as the head office of Johnson Wax in Racine by Frank Lloyd Wright from 1936 (even if this is a case of an office building and not a factory in the strict sense of the term) or, in a more accomplished manner, the extraordinary experience of Adriano Olivetti and his homonymous and articulated industrial complex in Ivrea, where the brightest and most acute minds of the period operated through design-manifestos in the period between the Twenties and the postwar years, failed to realize the hoped-for general effects on the building of work spaces which, in most cases, became victims to the economic and pauperistic logics of work “instruments”, producing, and we have reached the present time, a multitude of anonymous containers, defined precisely “sheds”: volumes scattered across the territory according to necessity and without any architectural reference or consideration. In actual fact – and this is the most alarming aspect – buildings for work suffer the same fate, everywhere, as the very idea of work and worker does, because when the latter is denied the status of person, and thus the idea of inhabiting and an existence centred on the necessity and dignity of work, and all human activity is subjected to the utilitarian logic of pure instrument for the production of goods, then it follows by analogy that the building housing him ceases to be a place for living, instead becoming a mere means of protecting the machines and the relative manufacturing processes from adverse climatic conditions. The walls “cease” to be walls, to be replaced by concrete panels, the windows disappear and with them the relationship with the outdoor environment, the roofs become mere covers of a shell of which we only perceive the volume and not the form, the structure a standardized component bought in an “assembly kit”. The factory consequently loses its status as “mill” and thereby the initial but admirable ingenuity which we today recognize the studied and protected “industrial archaeologies”. These buildings retained the dichotomy between their outward appearance of large “mansion”, often characterized by a poor but dignified brick façade, and the space within that is often structured according to typically “new” systems, with large spans made possible by light materials as cast iron columns and steel beams that are riveted together; these profiles are nothing but a transposition of what Gustav Eiffel had proved to be possible with the construction that became the symbol of Universal Exposition of 1889.
The use of these new construction techniques has made it possible to give the interior of the “modern factory” unusual dimensions, much larger than other building types, and to create spaces that allow great freedom of management, organization and distribution of the machines and thus improved production cycles and logistics. It is a matter of a pioneering phase, that has assumed an own formal expression, identity and communicative potential, characterized by the steam engine and with it, the presence of smokestacks.
Today these factories, that were built just outside cities, not far from more typically residential areas, during the first phase of the industrial development, are – as a result of the rapid urban growth registered in the years after World War II, as of the Seventies and Eighties of the 20th century – undergoing a significant and inevitable phenomenon in the history of factories; they are being renovated and turned to new uses. Almost all industrial complexes built on the edges of cities in the first half of the Twentieth century have been surrounded by the developing cities. The latter, incorporating them, have immediately transformed their operational conditions, making the original structures incongruous and incompatible with respect to the surrounding tissue. The industrial building consequently becomes a second-generation historical edifice, and is transformed into places and aggregates used for a variety of purposes that are compatible with its large dimensions - exhibition centres, museums, schools, gyms, shopping centres and other facilities - when the architectural image remains a testimonial of the work and society of the past, and demolished when the building, conceived during the second phase of its historical-typological development, fails to feature any of the aforementioned constructive characteristics, and instead belongs to the indistinct and anonymous category of the box, the simple container.
Unfortunately, in this second phase that we may define post-industrial, the manufacturing building, having been expelled from the city, is dispersed in the territory or “confined” to dedicated industrial areas where it is possible to perpetrate building hypotheses at a low cost but, due to the negligible architectural investment in not only economic but above all cultural terms, a very high environmental impact. This condition has in the current phase led to further changes in typology and morphology which have in their turn resulted in the realization of third- and fourth-generation industrial complexes that, coherently with the necessities imposed by a social and commercial situation dominated by the power of information, see architecture as an opportunity to communicate a desired quality, that is extended from the product to the places of production and to the world. Obviously, this phenomenon, fortunately for the landscape and the environment, is registering a very rapid expansion, first involving sectors with high added value as fashion, industrial design or the agrifood production – the new wineries designed by international starchitects are famous and celebrated examples – and now also the metal-mechanic industry, above all car manufacturers attempting the gargantuan task of persuading their clientele on issues of environmental protection and sustainability. This form of indirect advertising and communication is aimed at convincing the client that the company has attained its goal of total quality, not only with regard to the product, but also and above all to the production cycle and work conditions; these achievements are increasingly frequently demonstrated with pride through the growing phenomenon of visits at – and thus implicitly inspections of – the production areas on the part of the customers.
With these aims and objectives, large corporations are more and more often creating museums nearby their production areas in order to celebrate its history the technological and constructive know-how, aspects considered an indispensable element of every successful “brand” which is “forced” to tell the public who it is, where it comes from and how it produces. If, with the end of last century and the beginning of the new one (we are thinking of the case of Vitra, Benetton, Ferrari etc.) an observant and attentive clientele has decided to associate the factory with a new role as place of invention and semantic representation of its own parent company, today, a few years after the first, highly successful and fortunate examples, we witness a true fashion, where architecture is considered as one of the means of asserting a modus operandi aimed at marking a tangible difference between the products of a mature and efficient industrial section, and products coming from areas and zones of the planet that are still developing.
The contemporary factory thus becomes a means of asserting the brand through a proud “exhibition” of the exceptionality achieved in the building of the company’s own plant and the working conditions with which a certain product is realized; it is the coherent result of the application of a theory according to which the industrial building is manifested as an integral part of a more general marketing strategy. Metonymic and allegorical figures more and more often design and characterize production sites, and in particular the architectural impact generating new factories, that make formal research, the use of natural and environmentally friendly materials, the experimentation with building technologies capable of generating and manifesting a stimulating and creative architectural production become the most convinced and politically correct expression of a company’s specific modus operandi.
Many examples taken from the new configurations of production sites appear as true representative spaces; if we reflect on the reading of the plans and sections of many of the most “up-to-date” contemporary factories, the internal spaces at the service of the production cycle are to an increasing extent taking on the connotation of theatres of production. Catwalks and panoramic galleries – where the word panorama refers to and celebrates the assembly and production lines – scenic halls and rooms for visitors that often overlook large spaces dedicated to work activities, where an ongoing research aimed at creating an environment capable of offering ideal conditions for human well-being is superimposed on the contemporary and topical demand for compliance with regulations on energy efficiency and certified sustainability of buildings.
The long red band built inside the old Nestlé plant in San Paolo accompanies the visitors through an articulated suspended path, designed to allow them to familiarize with and admire the whole production cycle according to a Disney-style scenic representation. Red is also the colour chosen for the kilometre-long façade designed by Jean Nouvel for Brembo, used by the latter to accentuate the exterior of its industrial complex and mark its presence in the territory by the A4 motorway near Bergamo. The fronts surrounding the old Perfetti Van Melle plant in Lainate, redesigned by Archea in order to create more harmonious relations between the factory and the surrounding urban tissue, is on the contrary gelatinous and vitreous. These are only a few examples that confirm a more general and convinced typology and morphologic evolution that characterizes the contemporary industrial building.
The facades, the fronts to the world outside and the relationship between the interior and the urban context are obviously the elements that are most critical in this dizzying and sudden “rethinking”.
Vice versa, at least for areas strictly dedicated to production, the planimetric arrangement forms an invariant that is unlikely to depart from a rectangular plan and an extremely rational shell. Also the section appears to be a constant; as one may easily guess, it never has more than one floor, even if the ceiling height may differ. The roof is generally considered first and foremost a means of diffusing light, while research in the field of construction is oriented towards widening the structural spans and limiting the number of vertical supports. However, the most interesting and efficient examples feature no clear distinction between office area and production area, pursuing an equally necessary and desired integration between thought and action, between form and function and between blue-collar and white-colour workers, as this ancien regime and class-oriented division clashes with an expression of a determined attainment of total quality in every phase, every section, without any kind of distinction.