ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

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 Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 864 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 co...

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 Gasp...