Breathing new life into the ICO Workshops

Cino Zucchi is the architect appointed by Icona to redesign the historical Olivetti industrial buildings in Ivrea. Interview by Alberto Redolfi (Photographs by Davide Aichino)

Cino, you have been repeatedly called a “pop” architect. You are an irrationally passionate collector of objects and a music and cinema enthusiast. How would you introduce yourself to our readers?

The word pop is a neologism that actually refers to a long-standing debate: the dialectical relationship that exists in the arts and architecture between “high culture” and “popular culture” or, in more modern terms, between “high-brow” and “low-brow”. This distinction was famously made by Umberto Eco in Apocalyptic and Integrated, which along with Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, offers an unsurpassed commentary on the subject.
Many years ago, I wrote a book about Milan courtyards dating back to Spanish times, and in my research I traced the long genealogy of the arch on twin columns, that originated in the circle of artists around Raphael. Then, after the sack of Rome in 1527, it “traveled north” with Giulio Romano where it spread almost virally, and a hundred years later it was found in the courtyards of many palaces and public buildings in Milan and Turin. This motif started out as a “cultured neologism” but became widespread and almost “popular” over time. This happens quite often in the arts and I find it tremendously fascinating, just like its exact opposite: American pop art that borrows images from comics, advertising or magazines and elevates them to gallery material. When he was young, Claes Oldenburg explored in Ray Gun Wing the thousand degrees that lead from the figure to abstraction, from objects found in the street to artistic fruition.
Compared to what we might call the “classical eras”, today we no longer share a unitary culture, but we are divided into groups and subgroups with completely different thoughts, tastes, habits, fashion styles. All these subcultures coexist in shared urban environments that they actually alter day after day to adapt them to their needs. Unlike other art forms, architecture cannot choose its audience. And many of the architectural dilemmas that animate today’s cities — think for example of the controversial response in the press to the new skyscrapers in Milan or Turin — show us that people pass subjective judgments with no common ground on which to base them, according to aesthetic canons that are not shared by all. This is the predicament faced by architecture, planted on the ground and therefore exposed to many different audiences.
I wonder if it is possible to design an architecture that is both popular and cultured at the same time, where the two are not in opposition, but where the latter merely suggests higher and higher levels of understanding to those who are able to understand them. I would therefore define my work as a quest for the architectural equivalent of “sophisticated pop”. The music that I listen to while working at my desk — usually contemporary indie mixed with rock from the Sixties and Seventies — is catchy but not trivial, and it reveals its finesse only at the second or third listening. The same happens with architecture from the past and it should happen with more recent projects too: there are different levels of understanding art, but the second or third must never disavow the first. In terms of school education and background, the strange events of life have made me a cocktail of American scientism and European humanistic philology, which are often regarded as opposite but that are reconciled in my eminently empirical attitude. I have studied artificial intelligence programs such as LISP but then I have immersed myself in architectural treatises from the Italian sixteenth century. This oscillation from one extreme to the other has led me to distrust mathematical diagrams or pure historical erudition: my studies have led me to embrace the Docta Ignorantia advocated by Nicholas of Cusa and allow me to defend myself against people who use science or culture as a weapon to dominate or intimidate you.

A few years ago, I read in one of your interviews a statement that I agree with, along these lines: “life is messy and architecture must learn to tolerate and interpret it” … What did you know about Ivrea and its industrial heritage before taking on this prestigious assignment?

As an architect, you constantly mix social engagement with technical and artistic notions. The process of designing and then translating that design in reality has gradually become more specialized. While I have never believed in a demiurge-architect, I do believe that today we must resist the fragmentation of a project into many, perhaps too many sub-disciplines. The work we do as architects requires that we wear many hats: negotiators, directors, bricoleurs, builders, artists, communicators. We are called to face simultaneous but different levels of reality and judgments that are often very distant and varied: communicating with a soprintendente requires a certain language, which is not the same with a fireman or a bursar. Our product must sometimes reconcile contradictions that can be very far apart. It is the “crystallization” of a dynamic situation in a finite form. However, it must also maintain its structure and at the same time adapt to the lives, needs and aspirations that flow and will flow in the spaces we work on, considering that future needs may arise that were unforeseen at the time of its conception. In order to do this, the architect must adopt a somewhat “generous” attitude towards the project and its spaces, looking for more general solutions rather than small responses to the needs of the moment.

What did you know about Ivrea and its industrial heritage before accepting this prestigious assignment?

In the history of industry and architecture, Adriano Olivetti is a towering figure, and his words are quoted far and wide at conferences, at the risk of losing sight of the articulation and complexity of his thought. In parallel with his — alas — short but intense biography and the sometimes very rapid growth of the enterprise he led, Olivetti’s architecture follows a technical and formal evolution that starts with the original red brick factory and goes through subsequent additions by Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini along Via Jervis. It is a sort of arc that connects classic tectonics, ribbon windows alternating with horizontal plaster strips, all the way to the very long “pan de verre” metal profiles in the most recent additions. Similarly, the entire UNESCO site is like a showcase of Italian architectural culture of the last century: the buildings by Figini and Pollini as well as the canteen by Ignazio Gardella clearly express a specific critical revision of the axioms of the so-called “Modern Movement” that occurred in Italy after the World War II. What at that time could be regarded by functionalist orthodoxy almost as a betrayal — Reyner Banham wrote about a supposed “Italian retreat from modern architecture” — is considered today the most original contribution of Italian architectural culture, the one that generated the Torre Velasca and the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan.
Certainly, Figini and Pollini looked to northern Europe in search of examples to follow: just consider how the glass walls of the first two core buildings resembles the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam and the Bauhaus in Dessau. At that time, industrial buildings were seen by many avant-garde architects not only as functional, but as symbols of a new morality concerning the technical forms of work against the decorativism of late-eclectic architecture. Adriano Olivetti himself attached considerable importance to this ideal dimension: in his mind, the place of production should not be animated simply by “Taylorism” (where the human being on the assembly line becomes a prosthesis of the machine) but it should be an environment animated by great humanistic tension. Here his thought brought together in a very peculiar way the faith in technology and research and a personal socialism of utopian and, at times, mystical inspiration. The very concept of “Community” formulated by Adriano Olivetti blends together secular and religious elements. He was aware that his ambitious ideal of “work on a human scale” needed artists, a bit like a pope would rely on Bernini or Borromini. The history of Olivetti is characterized by tightly interwoven political and industrial projects and the arts, in particular architecture, graphics and design. I don’t know if Olivetti picked the architects himself, but the fact remains that the greatest names of the time all worked in Ivrea and on other company sites.
An extremely interesting element of Olivetti’s work in Ivrea is its spread-out character, that integrated with both the pre-existing town and the surrounding nature. In the last century many industrial complexes were organized in the form of a large impenetrable enclosure. There is a song by Enzo Jannacci, Vincenzina e la fabbrica, that conveys this idea very well: a man parts from a girl on the threshold of a large industrial building, bidding her farewell almost like a soldier entering the barracks or leaving for the front. Olivetti’s community model created instead a harmonious piece where the production site spread out to include educational, welfare, sports and recreational services, and even a convent. The production matrix is the catalyst of community life, but it also dilutes in more general terms in the life of the people it brings together. For this reason, the Olivettian nucleus should be observed against a much broader background — not only the town of Ivrea but the surrounding Canavese area as a whole. Many Italian factories of the last century should be regarded as complementary to the evolution and crisis of agriculture. They took labor away from the countryside and replaced the territorial organization of fields, irrigation ditches and farmsteads, sometimes according to the same paternalism with which the lord of the manor took care of his farm workers while exploiting them. This sort of contamination between agricultural and industrial models lies at the heart of the Italian concept of factory which is rooted in the local territory, unlike America where the two have remained more clearly separate. The roots of Italian factories reach deep into the soil of a business culture that is also nurtured by ancient knowledge. So, in its own peculiar way, Ivrea should be viewed not as a town but as a wider territory, where an entire community lived directly or indirectly together with the factory.

Based on your international experience, what is the current state of this town and what possible future do you envisage for Ivrea?

We live in a time when a whole generation of large industrial cities, like Detroit or Liverpool, have been forced to evolve and gradually overcome their “nostalgia for loss”. The same is true for Ivrea and the economic and social community created by Olivetti in its heyday. There is the need to elaborate the loss and mourn it in an almost Freudian sense — in Totem and Taboo Freud illustrates the transfiguration of the great father into an ideal yet abstract figure in the mind of his children — in order to be able to accept a more polycentric future. This will keep alive the innovative spirit and forward-looking gaze that Olivetti instilled in this town, and it will lead to developments in several directions. In the past, industrial foresight and innovation rested on “great captains”, political connections and the country as a whole, while today it is more articulated and polycentric. Just consider the theme of the districts that we hear so much about these days: what matters is no longer a charismatic figure, but rather a wealth of different knowledges that dialogue together building on their achievements, according to a “positive sum game” between different subjects. The driver is now not the leadership exerted by a single person, but a sort of magnetic power field. Of course, leadership still matters, but it has taken on different forms: if it is purely individual, it tends to lack relevance, it struggles to find a direction; today’s tendency is to identify and pursue goals along a shared path while accepting the plurality of knowledge and the complex nature of national and international competition. Thus the very seat of Olivetti must transfigure itself. In order to welcome this more multiform and pluralist reality and to meet increasingly difficult global challenges, the spaces of the ICOs must transform and take on a more articulated character, while remaining true to the matrix that inspired its generation.

In your work, you shun the repetition of an “architectural signature” (as some starchitects have been doing for decades now), trying instead to conceive architectural projects that reflect the character of a specific place or theme.

Luigi Pareyson, a Piedmontese philosopher, defined the artistic process in a way that I find extremely close to my own view, it sounds something like this: “Art has no laws or fireproof procedures, but it laboriously strives to find them, and it is precisely the final outcome that becomes itself, retroactively, its constituent law”. I think Pareyson really understood how an artist ‘works’, because there are no real norms in art, despite the fact that the artistic process incorporates different technical elements of knowledge. Having said that, I would basically divide artists into two broad ideal families. Let’s take cinema as an example: there are actors who always play the same character, who require the script to be tailored to suit them, and then there are actors who always change. Take Robert De Niro, who gained 20 pounds for Raging Bull and then became a perfect criminal in Cape Fear. Or Stanley Kubrick, who directed 2011: A Space Odyssey and yet he is not remembered as a science fiction director: from Lolita to The Shining, from A Clockwork Orange to Barry Lyndon, he always evolved and embraced new and different shooting techniques depending on the subject matter while preserving his sensitivity. The same happens in all forms of art: some artists work by successive variations on a theme, focus on in-depth research and rely on an intentionally limited language, while others seek the right words and forms depending on the context, that is constantly evolving. The Beatles’ White Album is a masterpiece of musical variety: there are rockabilly songs, an avant-garde piece like Revolution 9, acoustic ballads, distorted electric guitars. Similarly, in just a couple of years Franco Albini designed projects as different as the Rifugio Pirovano in the Aosta Valley, the Tesoro di San Lorenzo in Genoa and the SNAM offices in San Donato Milanese.
When considering these two attitudes, while I have no doubt that the first group of artists do equally great things, I like to think that I belong with the second group. I would not call it “eclecticism”, also because of the negative connotations that this word has taken on over time: it is rather a willingness, a commitment to respond to the specific character of a place or a functional program. The goal is not only to find the right approach and to tap into the right knowledge that each project requires, but also to give each project the right character, nothing more and nothing less than what the specific situation requires. Some may call this process hermeneutics — it is a commentary and an interpretation of a context that maintains a solid structure, a clearly recognizable vision, but one that also takes into account the new life that will flow within it.
This approach may also apply to the conservation and regeneration of the ICO Workshops in Ivrea. Some of their constituent parts are certainly unique testimonies of industrial architecture from the last century, but they cannot simply be frozen in a nostalgic snapshot, particularly because that would go against the spirit that animated Olivetti in his sometimes utopian thinking. If we were to make a monument out of everything from the past, if we were to consider all this physical heritage as an untouchable legacy, there would be no room for us to live in Italy — Italian towns are among the most stratified places in the world. Ivrea, like many other towns, needs to live in the present while building on its irreproducible, and therefore so important, past.

The inscription of Ivrea as a World Heritage Site is a unique case in Italy. It is also a recognition of the work of twentieth century Italian architects that you admire so much. In your city, Milan, you often take students around on motor scooters to show them the architecture created by Gardella, Figini and Pollini, Fiocchi. In Ivrea these fabulous architectures are all clustered together in an area that you can explore on foot within a few square kilometers. What is the effect of this potential on you and your work?

I am reminded of Dolores Hayden’s beautiful book, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism 1790–1975, in which she talks about the complex relationship between the construction of a social project and the physical space that will house it. In Europe we have New Lanark or the attempts — like the one made by Jean-Baptiste André Godin in Guise — to give concrete form to the “Falansterio” imagined by the French philosopher Charles Fourier. “We must recognize that artistic reality and social reality share many common traits. Both have an eminently formal character.” The relationship between space and society — to mention the title of Giancarlo de Carlo’s magazine, Spazio e società — is not mechanical. Every time that social engineering has attempted to combine the two through architecture, the result has been disastrous. There is however, certainly, a remarkable and mutual attraction: just like architects work better in the framework of a specific political or social ideal, an ideal often needs an architect to be represented in an urban, organized form.
The Ivrea complex is a UNESCO World Heritage Site but it does not possess the kind of unitary character of a major top-down project. It is rather a palimpsest where a guiding thought is able to evolve and change in relation to the dynamics of events and the concrete conditions that allow it to become reality. Olivetti is a company that grew rapidly and one is left with the impression that subsequent additions were conceived on the fly, relying heavily on intuition and the ability to seize opportunities and engage in dialogue with the many who were in charge of their design and construction. What I intend to emphasize about Olivetti is the ability to hold together different elements from different times made by different hands using different languages according to the same concept of community. It is a powerful project that radiates a sense of variety, a plurality of opinions, and yet one that is recognizable because it shares the same ideal model.
And then there is the fact that all this exercise reached out into a real town, a bit like some Italian universities — think Bologna or Pavia — where the campus is never isolated from but rather it is part of the urban fabric. The company developed in close connection with Ivrea and it remains part of its core to date. This ‘grafting’ exercise sets it apart from large American industrial complexes: America is full of great industrial architecture and office buildings, but they are often clustered in specific areas that make them appear like autonomous citadels — which were aptly dubbed ‘company towns’.

Your projects are characterized by a meticulous study of the facades, continuous expressive and technological research, a focus on open spaces, courtyards, paths and pedestrian areas suitable for socializing. How do plan to approach the stark severity of the ICO Workshops, their geometric structure, the context that surrounds them?

My approach hinges on the preservation of architectural artifacts and their qualifying elements, while remembering that new life must flow into the ICOs, a life made of different activities that together will capture and irradiate Adriano’s humanistic values. In so doing, the complex of the ICO Workshops bids farewell to the productive activities that shaped its past to open up to the town and the local territory through the light and the breadth of its repurposed spaces. In the production world, an open space is often only a service space. For centuries the rivers around which many historical towns developed were regarded as nothing more than transport infrastructures. It is only in the nineteenth century that the shores of a lake or a river became places of leisure where you could enjoy the landscape. Something similar happens now with the “Salone dei 2000” (Hall of the 2000), that was deliberately conceived as a place for large gatherings, or the large ‘sheds’ that were functional to production. Their environmental quality, that I could call ‘generosity’, calls for a transformation into something they were not originally designed for. A sensible project for the ICOs must both carefully describe and interpret their past, and test how the many elements that were originally conceived to respond to a very specific function can now accommodate something else. In Milan, a Jesuit college has become the Pinacoteca di Brera, and the Ospedale Maggiore has become a university: thanks to their brightness and spatial identity, their porticoed courtyards lent themselves over time to becoming completely different spaces while maintaining their relevance for the community.
Good architecture lasts longer than the vision that generated it; this simple realization is closely connected to the concepts of reuse and interpretation. I often think about how the great Slovenian architect Joze Plenik completely renovated the Castle in Prague by inserting many modern cameos: a small staircase, a large monolithic stone basin, a pole. These are elements of the author’s very personal language but at the same time they interpret and enhance existing spaces. In many such instances, the problem is not so much about the formal novelty of the additions, but rather a matter of physical connections and harmony between the new and the old. It is a compositional exercise, a bit like what happens when you “cover” a famous song: the melody remains true to the original, but the end result changes to reflect a different arrangement or vocal timber. As Carlo Mollino used to say, “the meaning is not in the word but in the accent”.

Your project for Ivrea contains references to the concept of “functional mixité”. This magazine was created to accompany the renovation process, trying to contribute useful cultural stimuli, to document the experience of those who are or will become involved, to facilitate communication between the inside and the outside, between the past and the present. Based on your experience, what is the one thing that we should not overlook, do you have any advice for us?

There are two types of house organs: those that are by and large company bulletins, and those that have become great cultural publications. The latter, while sponsored, have actively contributed to animating the public debate on certain issues, triggering reflections on aspects they brought to the fore. Since industrial development rests on innovation and new ideas, it could be said that any exchange between business and culture is fruitful. Just think of the strange relationship between Benetton and the photographer Oliviero Toscani, whose often provocative campaigns have added an element of social engagement to the brand’s communication, possibly altering the company’s industrial strategy in the process. This dialogue between industrial and art professionals is certainly nothing new, but today the overall picture has changed. We are constantly bombarded by all sorts of media, which results in confusion and often leads to nothing but ‘background noise’ that actually hinders any real exchange. When Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was first published, for years it was criticized for its somewhat crude neorealism, but I wonder: if a similar work came out today, would it still have the same gravitational effect? The problem today is that our attention threshold is so low, it pushes contents to take new forms. As the background noise increases, you have to become spectacular, you have to cut to the chase — in short, you need to respond to the mindset of the time in which we live. The same is true for cultured entertainment: a tv program can be intelligent and enriching, targeting a wide audience without resorting to populism. Today the key is being profound but also effective, without succumbing under the weight of journalistic trivializations.
As for this particular operation, one of the priorities would be, in my view, to revive the dialogue between five, six, seven, ten subjects that gravitate in the Olivetti universe. Ultimately, they all deal with the same object, but have no direct communication channels between them. The challenge lies in finding some common ground where everyone can express their point of view and make sure that, by putting them together, you generate significant interference, facilitating overlaps like the circles of a Venn diagram. This is what a company magazine should do: leave a certain autonomy to all those involved without losing sight of the common goal. Today, in addition to competing against other media — after all, a magazine has a somewhat retro vibe, like vinyl records or vintage watches — you must be aware that everything you say has already been said a thousand times and then some. As Leonard Cohen sang in one of his old songs, “Many loved before us / I know that we are not new. / In city and in forest they smiled like me and you”. I honestly don’t think that anyone can come up with something completely new and different to say today. But sometimes even the most banal and formally circumscribed forms can serve to anchor a rambling thought. So, you could try to clearly identify and limit the flow of your discourse: the number of lines, the colors and graphics… I find that sometimes an arbitrary and formal rule, a sort of cage, a format, can serve to anchor a variety of thoughts and make them memorable to our eyes. In his project Worlds in a small room, the photographer Irving Penn asked the people he portrayed to pose in a narrow corner of his studio: it was precisely that constraint that brought out their personality, that allowed it to manifest itself. I don’t mean to say that the graphical elements are paramount, but I do believe that creating a narrative from complexity and constraining a wealth of contributions into a very fixed, arbitrary framework could generate unity and enhance readability. After all, black and white in photography may appear as a limitation, when in fact it helps focus on the potential of reality and its interpretations through the camera lens and the printer. Paul Valéry said that “the poet finds ideas in the peculiar difficulties of his art that the non-poet strives to do away with.” In this sense, it will be the spaces of the ICOs that will inspire plenty of beautiful ideas, provided we are capable of observing them intelligently.