FIAT WORKS (LINGOTTO), TURIN, ITALY

Designed by Giacomo Matté Trucco completed 1916–1926
In 1916 the Italian automobile company Fiat, with Giovanni Agnelli at its helm, began
the construction of a modern factory that would take ten years to build and that
epitomized the American multistory concrete factory as established by architect Albert
Kahn for Henry Ford in the Highland Park Plant outside of Detroit in 1912, but with its
own innovations. Fiat’s earlier factories, typical of the time, were traditional multistoried
brick structures in the center of cities. With Lingotto Fiat Works, Fiat moved out of
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Turin, south of the center, to the west of the Po River on the via Nizza. There they could
improve their production methods and built a production space at an unprecedented scale
for European industries.
In 1912, Agnelli, Fiat’s founder, impressed with Ford’s automobile plants which he
had seen in Detroit, returned to Italy with the desire to build a factory similar both in
construction and production techniques. By hiring an engineer, Giacomo Matté Trucco,
to head the development, Agnelli immediately signaled the direction of the project.
Construction began in 1916 as a way to promote work and labor instead of war. It also
established his dynasty and the company’s growth; similar to the patriarchal attitude of
Ford, he wanted to help the working class.
Matté Trucco, trained at the Politecnico (Polytechnic Institute) of Turin as an
industrial engineer, spearheaded the production engineering and building planning. Based
on Taylor’s scientific theory of efficency for productive work and constant
mechanization of labor force, the production line was a continuous flow from the entering
of the raw materials to the assembly of the parts, and to the completion of a car and was
exemplary in factory design at the time.
The factory complex consisted of a main production building with smaller buildings
for preassembly work, and a separate office building, called the Palazzina (little palace),
completed in 1921. The design of the management offices was more traditional than the
plant itself, with a doric portico at its entrance. The main production building was often
compared to a skyscraper lying on its side and was without cellars or basements. It
comprises two long workshops that run parallel for a third of a mile and connected at the
ends, creating an elongated ring. At regular intervals, the long sides are linked by
towers—two inside and one at each end—to create the four interior courtyards. At the
south end is a square press-shop; on the north, a five-story building is part of the
assembly workshop.
The building composition exemplified efficient auto production of the time: Assembly
was begun on the ground floor, then cars were then taken up spiral ramps to consecutive
upper floors for further assembly and, finally, to the roof for a test drive on the track. This
was actually opposite to the Ford system, where the auto parts were taken up to the top
floor and then the car was assembled as it descended to lower floors and finally out to the
street. However, by the time Fiat Works was built, it was out-of-date, as Ford had begun
his single-volume one-story factories.
Fiat Works is significant as one of the first modular concrete buildings in Europe.
Matté Trucco was influenced by the work of the French engineer François Hennébique,
whose structures Matté Trucco had seen with his engineer father. Matté Trucco repeated
a square reinforced concrete module, 19 feet 8 inches by 19 feet 8 inches by 16 feet 5
inches high, to construct a 1664-foot-long (1/3 mile) by 264-foot-wide and 88-foot-high
building with four interior courtyards.
Within the modular concrete grid there are over 2000 steel sash-awning multiplepaned
windows that admit plenty of daylight to the interior spaces. Square concrete
columns with chamfered edges that, architectural critic and historian Reyner Banham
noted, were like those in the factories in the United States, are spaced six meters apart to
create as open an interior as possible. More innovative were the perforated horizontal
beams with regular rectangular holes for pipes and conduits.
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The two major engineering accomplishments include the one-kilometer-long rooftop
test track and the two poured-inplace spiral ramps at the north and south ends of the
factory. The truck-size ramps are outstanding sculptural constructions that move cars to
the roof track for testing without eliminating valued manufacturing space. The ramps
were also used for hand trucks and for pulling car parts floor to floor. The ovular rooftop
test track with banked curves at each end allowed cars to be tested at speeds up to 60
miles an hour, exceeding normal highway speeds at the time.
Renowned architects praised Fiat Works when it was completed. Le
Corbusier described the factory after his visit there in the 1920s as where
“the windows in a grille-like pattern are too numerous to count. The top is like that of a taffrail of a ship, with decks, chimneys,
courtyard and catwalks. Surely one of industry’s most impressive sights…. It is the Esprit
Nouveau factory, useful in its precision and with the greatest clarity, elegance and
economy” (Banham, 1986).
Edoardo Persico wrote of it in 1927 as the “ultimate metaphysic of form” and said of
the track, “so here the car and its speed are celebrated in a form that presides over the
work of the factory below, not only in terms of unity but also following a secret standard
that governs the ends of things.”
The building is significant not only in architectural history but in social history as
well. After it was built, it had to be part of emergency plans for post-World War I
assistance. During the Depression, the company had the normal internal troubles. In
1943, it was bombed, but the structure resisted destruction as Turin workers faced
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Mussolini. Then in the 1980s, when the plant closed, demolition was considered. Instead,
Fiat held an ideas competition for reuse, which architect Renzo Piano won, and
subsequently transformed the building complex into a conference center that opened in
1995.

BENETTON FACTORY, ITALY

Designed by Alfra and Tobia Scarpa; 1967–
The Benetton Corporation was a groundbreaking manufacturer both in terms of their
interest in design and the transition from manufacturer of goods to the making of a
service industry toward the idea of service-oriented production industries of the late 20th
century, which created a culture around a product. Their advanced, just-in-time
production and continual flow of goods from manufacturing to distribution influenced the
layout, design, and siting of their facilities. Spanning three decades of development, these
complexes in Treviso, Northern Italy, were designed by Alfra and Tobia Scarpa,
architects and industrial designers, who designed not only the factory and administration
buildings, but also developed with Benetton a new approach to retail design, which was
initiated with their international franchises in the 1960s.

Tobia Scarpa designed the first factory building for Benetton in 1967 in Paderno di
Ponzano, Treviso, with Christiano Gasparetto and Carlo Maschietto. The complex,
adjacent to an historic villa, comprises an administration building and manufacturing
facility identified by the different roofscapes for the two building typologies, setting up a
dialogue between the two functions, while creating a sense of the whole site.
The manufacturing facility’s primary structure is a girder and parallel series of Xshaped
prefabricated concrete beams. The X-shaped beams, 1.3 meters high by 1.3
meters wide with the profile exposed, have skylight glazing in the interstices, bringing
light to the manufacturing floor. The beams are supported on the 84-meter-long hollow
girder for the entire length of the building, forming the main axis, and by perimeter 9.2-
meter-high precast panels walls with a C-shaped section. The X-shaped beams, with their
sloped angles, reflect light in the interior and have the double duty of integrating the
building systems of pipes and electric wiring through the hollow channel.
The long beam identifies a streetlike spine for local circulation and a wider delivery
area bracketed by the production areas. The success of this layout led to its continued use
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for three additional facilities. Variation in the manufacturing space, through paving and
spatial divisions, makes a comfortable rather than overbearing work space.
A courtyard links the manufacturing hall to the administrative offices, a custodian
house, and the heating plant. Capping the offices, the architects designed pyramidal roofs
with cupola skylights by assembling three triangular 3-inch-thick prefabricated concrete
panels, each with a base of 3.9 or 4.5 meters, recalling the surrounding domestic
landscape. Reference to the local context is also made evident in the rustic waddle and
dab walls, with the sticks still visible.
In 1986 this complex was renovated and expanded to house prototype production,
offices for the computer systems, a conference center, a meeting room, and the runways
for fashion shows. A 600-car underground garage reduces the use of automobiles at the
site and creates unobstructed views to the site. Pedestrian pathways over ramps and
arched bridges above water channels create “streets” to lead to displays of Benetton
prototype stores.
In 1993–95 Benetton hired the Scarpas to build a two-part manufacturing facility in
Castrette di Villorba, Treviso, based on the same layouts as the earlier factories.
Castrette’s singularity lies in the structural system and unobstructed production space
employing a high-tech industrial aesthetic and materiality. The single-story complex was
built as two identical 18,000-meter-squared manufacturing buildings in seven, 25-meter
modules based on the dimensions of the cotton machines. The factory layout has three
distinct areas—centralized assembly, a central roadway spine, and two production areas.
The just-in-time production method made the access key to the site, so the architects
made the central spine a 40-meter-wide roadway, larger than the earlier factory.
To achieve the essential flexible and unobstructed manufacturing space, the architects
employed a structural system developed by Bridon Ropes of Doncaster, England,
normally used for bridges and here used for the first time for a factory building. A
reinforced concrete pier in the center of each of the seven modules anchors pairs of 25-
meter-high steel pylons from which thin steel cables extend to brace the trussed roof. The
roof trusses are, in turn, supported on the exterior reinforced concrete walls. The walls
are clad with insulated ribbed galvanized steel, creating a horizontal emphasis to the
complex. The steel manufacturers dipped the panels in zinc coating to create a
herringbone pattern resembling woven fabrics, symbolic of the activity inside. The
architects recessed the building under overhanging metal eaves with a wide cantilever
over the loading street. On the east and west facades the shed module profile is exposed
in the framework of the seven bays. They were also concerned with maintaining the
vistas and the landscape, so they lowered the building into the earth for a lower profile. In
the below-ground spaces, large skylights illuminate the workers’ cafeteria.
The exposed high-tech structure also conceals in its wall panel system a high-tech
building technology system of robotic production and computer controls in a fiber-optic
cables network and electronic systems. In the 1990s the highly automated sys-tem
provided information to the administrative offices for the control of 7,500 items every
eight hours as they were distributed to Benetton’s 7,000 selling points in the world. Both
visually and structurally, the building expresses the design, manufacturing, and
distribution process of an innovative company.