La materia dell’Arca La nuova sede di Gruppo Cap a Milano

It is our responsibility to use water sparingly. All too often we fail to realise its true value, seeing it as free or a cheap resource, believing there is enough for everyone. This underestimate means we often fail to collect it carefully and use it carelessly, dispersing it in abundance, without understanding that water requires careful management.

Gruppo CAP is an entirely public company that manages an integrated water service and does so with the awareness of the value that water has for each of us.

Its new headquarters, presented in these pages, is an expression of an architecture that intends to embrace the idea of a “public service”, an Ark capable of enhancing the urban periphery where it is located, of drawing citizens to itself by welcoming them in a piazza and hosting functions on its ground floor open to all.

The times we are living in every day turn our attention to the Earth’s climate, how water affects weather, and how water vapor – which envelops the atmosphere – makes life on our planet possible. Hence the warning of the “universal flood”, where the Ark created to preserve knowledge here becomes a metaphor for management capable of dialoguing with what surrounds it and of responding to the contemporary use of water resources.

Texts by Valerio Calzolaio, Claudio Lucchin, Mosè Ricci and Alessandro Russo. Photographs by Paolo Riolzi.