A rooftop racetrack: The Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy (1923)

Fiat, the phantom of order (1964)

Reyner Banham
Arts in Society
April 18, 1985

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Last year’s grand international consultation (don’t ever call it a competition) on the future and re-use of the old Fiat car factory at Lingotto in the inner suburbs of Turin, was demonstrably a gilt-edged occasion, since the exhibition of the proposals, mounted in the abandoned building itself, the sumptuous accompanying literature and all the associated manifestations clearly cost a pretty lira or two, and the architects consulted included our own James Stirling and Sir Denys Lasdun, as well as other heavy-duty talents from both sides of the Atlantic.

Like the equally grand consultations to find an architect for the second Getty Museum in Los Angeles, it may prove to be one of the major architectural events â€” or possibly non-events â€” of the past year or so. But why all the bother? Locally, the issue seems to be simply that Fiat is Turin, and Turin is Fiat. The company embodies and symbolizes the industrial power of the city, and the factory commemorates all that labour history and union politics that have marked the long years of the love-hateÂ relationship between Fiat and its workforce. Indeed, one reading of local history wouldÂ insist that the plant was built in its very straightforward concrete-and-glass form inÂ “deliberate and concrete response to the factory occupations, the demand forÂ syndicalist control, the workers’ councils.”

More than that, however, the Lingotto plant is just the biggest thing in town. A singleÂ building four storeys high and half a kilometer long, with a press shop and other ancillaries at either end that bring it up to almost the full kilometer, it outbulks even theÂ most grandiose of Turin’s baroque monuments. Its disappearance would not only reÂmove a big piece of local history, a memorial, a symbol; it would also leave a hugeÂ hole in the skyline along the via Nizza.

It would also remove a building whose unique position in the history of modem architecture cannot be equalled anywhere in the world. Hence the international interestÂ of which Fiat is so acutely aware. Yet it was the work of no great or famous architect,Â and the name of Its designer â€” Giacomo Matte Trucco â€” seems to attach to no otherÂ building that is known at all. Nevertheless, its status has been that of a masterpieceÂ ever since it began to be known in 1920-21. It got into all the forward-striving booksÂ by people like Le Corbusier immediately, and into English language texts by the likesÂ of Lewis Mumford within a decade. For this rapid acceptance there are two reasons, IÂ think: one is that it fulfilled a modernist myth; the other is that it had a terrific gimmick.

The gimmick is the most obvious attribute of the building. How else could it be aÂ gimmick if not obvious, even if it is a travesty of the designer’s intentions to call itÂ one? The building has a high-speed testÂ·track on its roof! Two 500 yard straights areÂ linked by high, embanked curves at either end. The track is reached by spiral ramps ofÂ extraordinary ingenuity â€”Â and beauty â€”Â that thread their way up through floor after floor.Â The undersides of the ramps are reinforced by concrete beams that radiate from theÂ columns around the central well like the ribs on the underside of water-lily leaves. TheyÂ were in all those Anglo-Saxon books in the thirties, but in the twenties all the real m0dÂernists had already been up the ramps and had then had themselves photographedÂ standing on the roof. The photographs of D’Annunzio, Marinetti, Le Corbusier I haveÂ seen recently; those of Gropius and Owen Williams (the engineer who gave you theÂ Empire Pool at Wembley, the Daily Express building, and those appalling bridges on theÂ first section of the M1 motorway) I have not seen for some time, but I bet they are all inÂ Fiat’s comprehensive archives, together with those of everybody else who ever wasÂ anybody in modernism.

Including, recently, myself. It was a weird experience â€”Â like finally arriving in the SistineÂ Chapel, Niagara Falls, or somewhere else that you’ve heard about since ever. But it was radically different in that this is the one you must arrive at by car, and experience from a car. To do it any other way would be almost a blasphemy, like arriving at aÂ pilgrimage church in the Middle Ages with anything but bare feet. The Fiat company carÂ came up the ramp, slowly enough for me to enjoy the structural ingenuity going on allÂ around, and finally emerged through a narrow slot round the back of one of the bankings and there was that famous view of 500 yards of rooftop straight, stretching ahead toÂ where the banking curved up to the left at the other end.

It was exactly like all those commemorative photographs, and I almost expectedÂ to see the ghost of Corbu standing there with his white pants, black jacket, glassesÂ and briar pipe (though I now know it is quite a different ghost who has the best claimÂ to walk the circuit of that roof).

Round that famous circuit we went â€”Â and after one single lap you knew why FiatÂ gave up using it for serious testing. A high-speed track it emphatically is not. Even aÂ modern Fiat, with all that clever suspension geometry underneath and good PirelliÂ rubber wrapped round its wheels, is in tyre-squealing, body lurching trouble on thoseÂ banked curves even at a modest 60kph. The curves are desperately tight, and haveÂ to be or the track wouldn’t fit on top of the building. But something seems to be unsettlingly askew with their geometry, too, as you come on and off the banking. WhatÂ all this must have been like in the early twenties, when Fiats stood tall on their high-pressureÂ “knife edge” tires and artilleryÂ·style springing but could, every one of them,Â do better than 70kâ€¦well, exciting, that’s for sure!

Which is what the whole design is about anyhow â€”Â the excitements of the automotiveÂ age. Giovanni Agnelli, the boss of Fiat when Lingotto was conceived in 1914,Â wanted an American-style factory like Ford’s famous (and even longer) plant at HighlandÂ Park in Detroit. But what separates Lingotto from American plants of the sameÂ period that I have been studying recently, is sheer rhetoric. The American plants areÂ useful and fairly cheap facilities for manufacturing things in. Fiat, which is uncannilyÂ like an American concrete-framed building in all its details, is also a public statementÂ about modem manufacture, about modernity itself. Marinetti hailed it (of course) asÂ “the first invention of Futurist construction.”

He got it wrong. Had he known what he was talking about, he would have had toÂ damn it with the foulest epithet in his inflamed vocabulary: passeiste. By the time LingottoÂ and its ramps were finished in 1926, it was already becoming passÃ© by AmericanÂ standards, for Henry Ford was getting out of multi-storey Highland Park, and movingÂ more and more of his operation into huge single-storey tin sheds at the River Rouge.Â Lingotto was really a monument â€”Â a memorial to a myth of modernity, and of AmericaÂ as the home of modernity. The racetrack on the roof was the final and necessary symbolicÂ flourish, like the stone laurel wreath on the head of a statue.

That last simile I have borrowed more or less directly from Edouardo Persico, theÂ most intelligent, eloquent, and tormented of the younger Italian architects who perished under the Mussolini regime. Disappointment was probably the core of his torment.Â As the youngest member of Musso’s pioneering embassy to the Soviet Union inÂ 1923, he must have hoped that the fascists would keep open the links between theirÂ radicalism and that of the left, but he was barely back from Russia before he had theÂ first of his political troubles and found himself in jail. From then until his death inÂ 1936, he had the sort of existence that can be immensely productive in both design-work and writing, yet remains somehow marginal to real life. For part of that time, heÂ actually worked at lingotto. Out of that experience he produced, in 1927, his firstÂ architectural writing.

Mussolini inaugura la Fiat (1936)

It is an extraordinary piece of work, dominated by the sheer bulk of the building, andÂ its intimations of a secret order beyond the human:

Atop the building, the test track is like a king’s crown, and just as a crown symbolizes someÂ essential and dominating idea, so here the car and its speed are celebrated in a form thatÂ presides over the work of the factory below, not only in terms of the rationality of utility, butÂ also according to some secret standard that regulates the ends of things. A mysterious logicÂ of harmony â€”Â which the architect has followed intuitively as a sign of authority â€” has elevatedÂ the track to the summit of a work of man; much as the authority of a on theÂ head of a king transcends the merely human face below, and weighs upon it with the force ofÂ a dominant rule.

I don’t think this has anything to do with the Divine Right of Kings â€”Â however wellÂ such a concept might have suited Agnelll, il Re dell’Industria â€”Â but it has a lot to doÂ with the desire for a comprehensible sense of order in a disorderly world, where the oldÂ rules of God had been banished and replaced byâ€¦well, nothing, except the dictatesÂ of a rationality bent to the service of madmen like Mussolini.

An order beyond human lunacy had its desperate attractions. Persico describes theÂ workers waiting to enter the plant for the morning shift:

They do not speak, they do not move as they would in other human assemblies; they wait.Â All things are already in order, nothing can be changed; everything obeys an order which isÂ not the expression of human will, but of a wisdom submissive to the Laws. They await theÂ laws; they are a people still confused. without order, an image of humanity without rulesâ€¦they have more need of order than of bread.

As one who, long ago, used to stand amorphously in a waiting crowd, silent in frontÂ of the gates of quite a different factory, I can vouch for the observational truth of tinat.Â I don’t, however, buy that apparent appeal for order at any cost, even though I knowÂ that it is not an appeal for the corporate order of the new fascist state but more likelyÂ an amalgam of Persico’s disciplined Catholic upbringing, and tine Ordine Nuovo, “aÂ just society, an orderly society, made up of equals,” Imagined from prison by AntonioÂ Gramsci, the only other Italian thinker of the period whom I find as sympathetic asÂ Persico and organizer of the syndicalist occupation at Fiat after the first world war.Â But in the abandoned hulk of Lingotto, that thirst for order is an ever-present factor.

Those vast empty floors, almost purged of signs of human use or occupation, andÂ inhabited only by endless rows of square concrete columns that stretch to apparent infinity, obeying no visible law save those of perspectiveâ€¦See, it’s catching! TheÂ phantom of order conjured up by Persico will not go away now for me. On the roof, even if I can’t take the test track too seriously, it seems okay to be your regular cheerful modernist,Â but in the body of the works, a different orderâ€¦damn, there it is againâ€¦seems to prevail, and here Lingotto is superficially very like its American predecessors.

I have seen the inside of a lot of abandoned American industrial real estate over the last few years in the course of my researches, and I kept catching that quality, long before I rediscovered that Persico text. Cleaned and abandoned, with vast windows and endless rows of regular repetitive columns, these clean well-lit spaces have an uncanny and deeply reassuring calm. The noise and bustle of production, the bulging accumulations of racked products, have long departed. All that remain are rational frameworks for human activities â€” awaiting their orders. But even in what remains of Ford’s “Old Shop” at Highland Park, the only American site that has anything like the historical importance and cultural consequences of Lingotto, they are just neutral containers for which alternative uses, if any, will be found by the normal mechanisms of the market economy.

Lingotto is not just a neutral container. Too much cultural weight, too much self-conscious pursuit of modernism, too many quests for the order of the Laws, still haunt its 70 year old concrete. Whatever their real motives, Fiat are perfectly right to propose that its future be taken out of the hands of the market. But I see in none of the competition entriesâ€” Â sorry! consultative proposals â€” much real sense of that phantom of order which Persico left to stalk its echoing floors and which ascends by the two spiral ramps to the track that crowns the whole enterprise with a “a concrete image of speedâ€¦where nothing may deny the car.”