Producing the Factory: Architecture and Space of Industrial Work in Italy

The renewed relationships between technical, economic, and product philosophy aspects have therefore introduced formal codes and repertoires capable of translating the relationship between space and labor triggered by the new production processes. The materials and expressive languages were consequently profoundly changed by a representation of industrial work that sought to translate the new symbolic meanings in which the new Italian corporate culture recognized itself. These new conditions propose new themes and issues for Italian architecture. It therefore seems legitimate to ask whether the spatial paradigms of the modern Italian factory still represent a reusable foundation for architectural design. Provisionally adopting Jacques Gubler's intuition that it is the bay in its ‘initiating valence’ that can be considered a type, that is, a sort of reusable spatial preform that acquires formal significance through juxtaposition. The ‘principle of the bay’ as a reinterpretable modern archetype takes a compositional value, a direction for the architectural research for industry building projects.