Melchiorre Bega Corporate Interiors (1959-70): Transience and Care

Melchiorre Bega (1898-1976), architect and designer, was a refined interpreter of the 20th century Italian culture. His long activity documents the investigation on the design possibilities at different scales: from stores to villas, from corporate architecture to tall buildings. From Bologna to Milan, Bega’s work expresses a world of relationships that led his production outside national borders. As well as in major projects where he spanned five decades and different seasons of Italian architecture, Bega introduced new interior design concepts experimenting with domestic and public furniture. The research conducted on the Melchiorre Bega fund (Archivio Progetti, Università Iuav di Venezia), analyses the innovation features of three corporate buildings realized in Milan in the second half of the 20th century, where interior design represents an integral part of the modern project: Galfa tower (1959), Stipel headquarters (1964) and Selection from Reader’s Digest offices (1970). These buildings represent important examples of Bega’s legacy, now at risk (or partially lost) because of a triple fragility that endangers modern heritage: the first is related to the status of modernity that has prevented the historicization and recognition of their values; the second is intrinsic to the lack of durability of industrial building materials and techniques; the third is linked to the limits of national regulation in protecting private heritage built less than 70 years ago. The study examines the transformative phenomena of the selected buildings relating them to the case-study of the Axel Springer headquarters in Berlin (1966). The analysis of the current state of the interiors, usually intended as an open system more susceptible to changes and more affected by time, allows to highlight different roles of time and use, and to identify physiological transformations capable, in a few cases, of generating hybrid but careful contaminations.