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[old is gold] > intro | project | materials | interview |

FUTURE PAST
project by Giancarlo Marzorati, Mario Botta
photo by Alessandro Paderni, EYE-Studio
text by Patrizia Lugo Loprieno

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They used to call it the Stalingrad of Italy. 85,000 inhabitants, fifteen minutes on the Metro from the centre of Milan. Today it is an incredible experimental laboratory working on new ways of transforming this vast, defunct industrial zone into a “city of ideas” – clean, sustainable and a joy to live in. Among the first to sign up was architect Giancarlo Marzorati, who, with Mario Botta, was the brains behind the project for what was once the Campari factory site...

THE CONTEXT  Sesto San Giovanni was once one of the major industrial conurbations of the 20th Century, home to numerous factories, radical political movements and a hive of trades union activity. The speed and the extent of the changes wrought in Sesto’s urban and social fabric in under one short century were quite breathtaking: from a sleepy farming community with a sprinkling of the country houses of the Milan aristocracy, it became one of Europe’s most productive industrial hubs and a subsequently a booming centre for the high-end service sector. This dramatic series of transformations makes it almost unique among what was indeed a century of change for Europe and Italy.
A new city is now set to rise on the remains of all those industrial buildings that today seem like the ghosts of a bygone era. A huge undertaking, but also an unmissable opportunity to redesign the whole area, to create the iconography of a different future.
It is different because it is to be built on the remains of the great tradition that was Italy’s 20th century manufacturing history, often a painful history, but one that has nonetheless left a legacy of great hopes, passion and enduring human endeavour. With all this behind it, it would have been unthinkable not to design that future with care, to make conscious choices for the only future possible, a future built on the past and one that is, above all, sustainable.

Taking the Falk steelworks site as an example... Some 1.3 million square metres.  Once it had been decommissioned the weeds took over, then a few years ago it was acquired by Luigi Zunino’s redevelopment finance company Risanamento. The work for the project was commissioned from Renzo Piano and the erstwhile steel works will become a populated garden, bursting with exuberant new life.  It will be the ‘city of factories’ and the ‘factory of ideas’. All its energy needs will be met from green, renewable sources, from heating produced by solar panels to public transport in “elfi”, hydrogen-powered minibuses, a project in the capable hands of Carlo Rubbia.

Sesto has been moving in this direction for some time... In the area once occupied by Ercole and Magneti Marelli, Sesto now boasts a brand new, state-of-the-art office complex in which leading companies such as Oracle, Wind and others have installed themselves. One of the most interesting buildings from the architectural point of view is the Blue Building, home to the head office of ABB, the world-famous engineering group with a commitment to the exploitation of sustainable energy sources. The building is a “blue wave”, clad in interactive glass, designed by architect Giancarlo Marzorati, conceived and built to consume 30% less energy that a conventional building.

THE PROJECT  A firm commitment to sustainability is also a distinguishing feature of the project to develop the old Campari site, a design by Giancarlo Marzorati and high-profile Swiss-born architect Mario Botta. The idea behind the project was to recover this historic building and the area around it, a site with a rich legacy of memories, knowledge and manufacturing inventiveness, while keeping the executive nerve centre of the multinational in Sesto.
The original Davide Campari factory dates back to 1904, when it was built on the 28 mq plot that has today undergone this major make-over, a contract worth over 60 million euro, planned by the drinks company and carried out by Moretti Contract.
Campari Spa has thus kept its HQ on the historic premises in the city that was its manufacturing base for over a century. The 240 employees of the Milan offices now enjoy a space of some 9,000 mq, in a highly strategic position only a stone’s throw from the Metro line, on one of the area’s main thoroughfares. The complex reaches a height of 38 metres, framing the tiny Liberty-style façade of the old factory. The regeneration plan also involves restoring Casa Alta Villa, which is now to become the Campari brand museum, and the 6,000 mq  of parkland is no longer fenced off, but open to the public.

Two residential towers complete the new service-sector complex, of respectively 13 and 9 floors, with an overall floor area of 14,000 mq. In addition to a number of different types of housing, the basement area offers residents a range of leisure services: a gym with swimming pool, a children’s play area and other spaces for social activities. Speaking of the powerfully iconic appearance of the two towers, Botti describes this in terms of their functional origin: “...it was necessary for us to work on 13 floors overall, thus rising at least three floors above the current Sesto skyline and this led us to adopt architectural solutions that would favour a more figurative image for the two towers. The decision to split the towers in half visually and particularly to make use of terracing lightens the horizontal and vertical impact and makes the buildings more pleasant to use.”
The entire complex could definitely be described as state-of-the-art from the eco-sustainable point of view. A particular feature of the residential buildings is the self-ventilating walls that make it possible for air and light to filter through, according to the time of day. The energy required to air-condition the towers is produced using the underground water table, from which Campari used to take the water for its famous drink, to a depth of 120 metres. This makes use of the temperature delta between the subsoil and the surface. All the housing and office units are equipped with a domotic system to control the electrical, heating and video-surveillance installations. These design features make all the buildings Class A certified.
As if all this were not enough, Botta and Marzorati have redesigned the entire area in such a away that it is integrated into the urban landscape, in harmony with both its past and its present. This is an idea generated by a construction culture based on the notion that the quality of our life is heavily dependent on the places in which we spend our time. The way in which the spaces, green areas and facilities are organised represents the real difference in the places in which we can truly live, rather than merely survive.Looking at the newly completed Campari building on Via Gramsci, that encompasses the body of the old factory, treating it with respect bordering on veneration and even with tenderness, brings to minds the words of Rilke: “We are born provisionally, so to speak, in some place; it is only little by little that we manage to compose within us the place of our origin, only to be born there afterwards, and every day more definitively.” (from Milanese Letters, 1921-1926).
Can this also be true of buildings? I think not. What is certain is that to know is often, platonically, to recognise. As Mario Botta himself reminds us: “In urban societies such as Sesto, through which a swathe has can been cut by globalisation and the late 20th Century flight from industrialisation, the quest for their own identity inevitably passes by way of the sense of belonging to their own territory, of recognising their own past.”

For Mario Botta, the ex-industrial city limits “are the areas in which the future of our cities is in play”. Botta has undertaken urban renewal projects in the past, for example, the new home of MART (Museo di Arte Moderna di Rovereto e Trento), built to revitalise a derelict area. Moreover brickwork, and particularly terracotta, has always featured in the architectural design lexicon of the Swiss-born architect, just as it has in the history of Sesto. (see: ‘Materials’)

Giancarlo Marzorati is an expert and active participant in plans to redevelop his home town and its community. An interview about this project immediately reveals the passion he brings to it: “For Sesto S. Giovanni the Campari building is much more  than just another factory: it is an integral part of our history, it is something quite special... that, even from its inception, was of a different nature because the product was associated with taste and flavour, and it was known, even then, that innovative communication strategies were the road to success… creating an identity that would be impossible to imitate and to forget...”