INDUSTRIALISATION
AND MODERNITY
IN ARCHITECTURE

On 12 July 1956, the first bucketful of concrete to be poured for the foundations of the Pirelli Skyscraper received the archbishop’s blessing. In 1954 work had begun on demolishing the historic Brusada complex, part of Pirelli’s first factory in Milan. The company, which introduced the manufacture of elastic rubber to Italy, was founded in 1872 by the engineer Giovanni Battista Pirelli, a graduate of the Politecnico University of Milan. The company, which introduced the manufacture of elastic rubber to Italy, was founded in 1872 by the engineer Giovanni Battista Pirelli, a graduate of the Politecnico University of Milan. In the first factory, which at that time stood outside the city and initially consisted of a single building beside the Sevesetto River, five office staff and forty workers were engaged in the production of rubber belts, valves and hoses. In a short time, the business expanded to include sanitary and technical fittings, electrical conductors. In 1890, to start production of tyres for bicycles, another plot of land known as the Brusada was purchased, the last available for the expansion of the factory, which already employed thousands of employees in 1905. By this time, the city had grown and took up the whole site, so in 1908 another factory was opened in the Milan Bicocca district. This continued production following the decommissioning of the first plant in Via Ponte Seveso, which was destroyed by air raids in 1943. At the war’s end, the site of the first factory was sold to the municipality, with the exception of the Brusada. Here the Pirelli Skyscraper was to be built as the Group’s new headquarters at the behest of its presidents Alberto and Piero Pirelli. The design of the Skyscraper was entrusted to the Ponti-Fornaroli-Rosselli and Valtolina-Dell’Orto offices and to the engineers Pier Luigi Nervi and Arturo Danusso for the reinforced concrete structure. At the end of 1954 the main features of the Skyscraper were established: a 31-storey building 127 metres tall. Unique in its identity, both architecturally and in the design of the interiors, it was described by Carlo De Carli in Pirelli magazine in 1956 as the “Italian expression of universal technology”. Gio Ponti summed up the principles embodied in the project in his article “Expression of the Pirelli Building under Construction In Milan”, published in “Domus” in 1956. They were “a finished form, restraint, representativeness, expressiveness, ‘illusiveness’, technical innovation, honouring work and incorruptibility.” Officially opened on 4 April 1960, the development of the building also followed specific criteria to resolve a series of urban, social and economic issues, as well as for the architectural composition. In this way, the Skyscraper formed a vital part of the development of the great modern city that was Milan, in keeping with a new vision inspired by the solutions adopted in metropolises on the other side of the Atlantic.

Group of graduates at the Politecnico di Milano in 1870. At the center, Giovanni Battista Pirelli, founder of the company Pirelli

The first view of the Pirelli factory in 1872 in a reproduction by Salvatore Corvaja, 1922