LOMBARDY:
A SMART LAND
FOR A SUSTAINABLE
FUTURE
And tomorrow? What will the Milan and Lombardy of tomorrow be like? “To compete, a city needs to have wings and roots,” maintained Ulrich Beck, an authoritative scholar of metropolitan transformations. Roots, meaning the awareness of its own history. And wings to be able to fly towards the horizon of the future. A sophisticated ability to deal with the future of memory.
And tomorrow? What will the Milan and Lombardy of tomorrow be like? “To compete, a city needs to have wings and roots,” maintained Ulrich Beck, an authoritative scholar of metropolitan transformations. Roots, meaning the awareness of its own history. And wings to be able to fly towards the horizon of the future. A sophisticated ability to deal with the future of memory. This metropolis, and this region, have all the credentials they need to deal confidently with a season marked by the fragility and uncertainties of the crisis and an unprecedented series of opportunities for change and development. The Pirelli Skyscraper was a symbol of innovative business culture during the intense years of the economic boom. And then of an ambitious institutional culture, in the time of reforms that led to the birth and development of the regions, with a political idea inspired by the effective government of the territory. Today, the Skyscraper remains among the landmarks of a metropolis that is committed to promoting sustainable environmental and social development. In reconstructing its history, we have listened to ten voices, those of Piero Bassetti, Eva Cantarella, Alessandro Fermi, Attilio Fontana, Giuseppe Guzzetti, Uliano Lucas, Carlo Ratti, Gianfelice Rocca, Andrée Ruth Shammah and Marco Tronchetti Provera, women and men who represent politics, culture and the economy. In memories and forecasts, their words reveal the prospects for a region that has passed through moments of great difficulty and, despite everything, has always been able to leverage its own abilities to dream, hope, plan and build. To work. The future, therefore, speaks of smart land and senseable city, of technological humanism and sustainable economy, in environmental and social terms. Of interconnections and better governance of fair trade globalisation, tailored to people and their rights. And of a new metropolitan condition in which Milan and Lombardy, firmly established in the heart of Europe and with their eyes turned towards the Mediterranean, will be able to create original synergies between industry with solid manufacturing roots and expansion on the international markets, between local values and the need for flows (of people, capital, ideas), between genius loci and artificial intelligence, between high-tech services and a concern for quality training for the new generations, and between competition and social commitment. This striking landmark, which all the conversations about the Skyscraper have brought out, is that of an original multi-disciplinary culture with the ability to combine the humanities and scientific knowledge, cutting-edge research and popular solidarity. The knowledge economy and a concern for the quality of life, for widespread social well-being, are solid values that this region is capable of expressing in Institutions and businesses, and in social and cultural organisations. With a particular aptitude for metamorphosis. For which, even in the most contentious of times, it is capable of planning its own future.
Read moreAttilio Fontana
President of the Lombardy Region
Sixty years ago, the genius of Gio Ponti gave life to the symbolic building of Milan and Lombardy. The Pirellone, authentic expression of progress and high-tech, has watched over the changing of customs, the growing affluence achieved by means of work and ingenuity and the evolution of a contemporary, cosmopolitan metropolis. The Skyscraper, a concrete, living presence, a cathedral of modernity, turns its gaze to the future, while the stories of men and women swirl busily around its base.
Leggi di più
Alessandro Fermi
President of the Lombardy Regional Council
The Pirellone has played a leading part in many seasons of Lombard life and always proved perfectly capable of performing new functions. [...] Then in 1978, after eight years without a fixed home, the Lombardy Region acquired the Skyscraper as its headquarters. This extraordinary partnership between the building and the Institution clearly and immediately conveys a dynamic and modern identity, the offspring of Lombard industriousness.
Leggi di più
Marco Tronchetti Provera
Executive Vice Chairman, CEO of Pirelli and Chairman of Fondazione Pirelli
In the sixties the Skyscraper rapidly became a symbol of the economic miracle, in an Italy that wanted to rebuild and free its extraordinary energies, so as to become in a few years one of the largest industrial world powers. They were the energies of the business world, together with those of political life and the trade unions, in a great unified project of development, a better quality of life. The Pirelli Skyscraper is a significant confirmation of this: the desire for recovery by a major company strongly rooted in Milan and at the same time international.
Leggi di più
Piero Bassetti
First president of the Lombardy Region
Milan has been able in a way to transform a monument from a symbol of a corporation to a representation of the republican Institution. This, in my opinion, is one of the reasons why the Pirelli Skyscraper is cherished and unquestionable for Milan, because it was built by the private sector and capitalism and was consensually introduced into the democratic development of the country in a phase of transformation of Italian society and political organisation. I see the Milan of the future as certainly very different from the present, because glocalisation has radically changed the very idea ofthe city. Today, when we speak of the city,we no longer refer to a former municipal dimension, but to a metropolitan one. [...] Distance working is changing the speed and space of the relationship, so that today, forinstance, you can hold a board meeting ofglobal dimensions without much difficulty. Everything is changing and we have to planthe city with the logic of the future. The Milan that is making history is an enlarged urban reality. It extends, we can say, from Cuneo to Trieste. The city is undergoing a very strong change bound upwith technology. Now it is possible to relate to each other in a global space. And this changes all interpersonal relationships.
Leggi di più
Eva Cantarella
Historian
I remember very clearly that the construction of the Pirelli Skyscraper [...] was the symbol [...] of this new Milan, which at that time was also a model to be exported abroad because [...] it inspired the Pan Am building in New York. It was the Milan where you went, for example, to the Derby where Gaber was performing [...]. It was the Milan of Walter Chiari [...]. There were some new, absolutely modern things, which I realise now [...]. Not all cities had this intellectual diversity at all levels because it was intellectual on one side and social on the other. I see the future of Milan in a period like that, because Milan has one thing, Milan has been well governed. I always say, and others too, that governing Milan — of course it is always a difficult task to govern a city — is helped by the Milanese who somehow govern themselves. And so I see a very good future for Milan.
Leggi di più
Giuseppe Guzzetti
Attorney, president of the Lombardy Region from 1979 to 1987
Today [...] there is a Milan projected towards the future. When I gazed out of the big windows on the thirtieth floor, I had two spectacles spreading out before me. The first was a breathtaking view, stretching from the Maritime Alps to Monte Rosa, the Swiss Alps, the Lombard Prealps and Alps, the Bergamo and Brescia Alps, the Po Valley, Brianza. But almost at hand I had a huge chasm where [...] there was still the rubble of buildings, those that had been demolished. Huge voids that, during the Christmas period (it was this custom at that time, I don't know if it still continues) were mostly occupied by the big tops of the circuses that came to town in the Christmas season. Today that Milan is gone, now the void has been filled with skyscrapers. Archistars from around the world have designed these new buildings in Milan and, as mentioned at the beginning, this is the Milan of the future.
Leggi di più
Uliano Lucas
Photojournalist
I was struck by an elderly man with a suitcase and a box who was wandering across Piazza Duca d'Aosta in front of the Pirelli Tower and I stopped him. He asked me for directions and we got talking. He was a Sardinian from Olbia. And I started talking to him about Sardinia. He told me about Sardinia, he practically told me a part of his life story. I explained where he could go and much else. He was on his way to Rho and after a while I said, “Look, can I take some pictures?” [...]. I shot a whole roll of film, thirty-six frames, and in the end that photograph came out with the Skyscraper looming up, that man gazing. There are still the old tram lines and another man is behind him. The photo has become an icon [...]. It is a photograph that represents emigration past and present because it is very simple, the Skyscraper is Gio Ponti, the Skyscraper is Pirelli, the Skyscraper is the economic miracle, the Skyscraper is Milan. My first memories are practically of the construction work. They’re the memories of anyone in Milan who passed by and was enraptured at the height. [...] It was this extraordinary, incredible height, growing gradually, day after day, and then the newspapers that continually wrote it up. The Madonnina would come up, it was discussed, and there was a close identification with that Milanese industriousness. As it was built it became clear that it was practically the symbol of Milan.
Leggi di più
Carlo Ratti
Architect and engineer, director of the MIT SenseableCity Lab
Today is a beautiful time for cities, because all those technologies that have changed our lives in the past ten, twenty, thirty years – I am thinking of networks, of digital – are entering the city, physical space. A very easy way to say this: the internet is becoming the internet of things. And in doing so it is enabling us to understand, read and plan the city in a different way. Well, this is the world that is often called the world of the smart city or the senseable city, if we give it a more human meaning and one more connected to people, and this is a great potential, a great new tool for all of us that deal with design, to understand and think about our urban future.
Leggi di più
Gianfelice Rocca
President Gruppo Techint
Milan clearly has to invest in sectors that are projected towards the future. It is a city that also has industrial exposure in the green sector, which is certainly very important. And it feels the decisive weight of digital technology, an enabling sector for the whole economic and social world. The goal: to make the metropolis a smart city, [...] meaning a city that can be lived in easily, thanks to the quality of its development and relationships. I believe that a challenge for all of us is to make sure that in Milan, given its cultural tradition, the digital revolution does not change us all and make everything virtual, but instead is placed in the service of a real technological Humanism. And that will mean making the most of this revolution in bringing services to the citizens, in encouraging human contacts and communication, in making music, theatre and other cultural activities more accessible and widespread. In making sure that all this takes place in a form that maintains the same spirit that animated the Pirelli Skyscraper: with head raised high, but feet placed firmly in society.
Leggi di più
Andrée Ruth Shammah
Stage director and manager of the Teatro Franco Parenti –Bagni Misteriosi
The Skyscraper is a part of Milan that is modern yet classical. [...] It is when modernity becomes contemporary, but classical, meaning that a form is just right from the start, and never needs to be reviewed or revised. [...] The Pirelli Skyscraper was always in our minds, even before it was there. As soon as it was built, it was as if it had always been there. This, I think is Milan: Milan impresses me because, even when it invents, it tries to always stay within a tradition. It has fewer traditional buildings than big cities like Rome or Venice, yet everything that is added seems as if it had already been there. Set side by side, don't the styles go well together? They do look good. This is the Milan style.
Leggi di più