Neither idealization nor justification of the past: the reinterpretation of Italian industrial spaces as a stimulus for contemporary projects.
[Prometheus. Work places and spaces 1872-1992]. The places and spaces of work have the same dignity, the same charm, but also the same eyesores and errors as residential spaces. In continuing metamorphosis, they are transformed and changed their uses: their future is the future of economic life and recognition of their value implies an evaluation of the transformation of industrial structures, from an inaccessible image of power to today’s condition of primitive simplicity.
From the former Crespi cotton mills of Adda to the Cartiere Burgo in Mantua, the Olivetti plant in Ivrea to the dam of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Mulino Stucky in Venice to the Ilva of Taranto, the volume is a historical-architectural voyage through the most significant examples of Italian industrial architecture and urban planning, from the unification to the present.
Accompanied by a wide range of images, the book illustrates the rediscovered nostalgia of industrial archaeology, for a reinterpretation of solutions, paths, errors and successes involved in the continuing modification of the spaces in which we work.