The roman arch
What i really like observing this placet, is the attention to particulars. It was an industry, but this didn’t prevent to build nice windows with arches. To someone may sound banal, but if i think that nowadays industries, and not only, are built the most with prefabricated pieces, i feel my heart get warm to see all this love for architecture. The prefabricated has it’s advantage, otherwize it wouldn’t be so spread, but it does limit the architect’s creativity and the urban landscape resents of it. I live in a prefabricated house, and around me there are many houses just the same: if it wasn’t for the use of different colours i would get mixed up. The colour isn’t anyway enough to give diversity and complexity. Not far from where i live thre is an industrial area: all the buildings look exactly the same, there is nothing beside the sign on the gate to tell anything about the companies inside. There’s no personality. The Richard Ginori has much to say about itself, even trough abandoned old buildings. Inside it seems as if there is nothing left of the machineries or of the workers’s job, probably due to the imminent restauration, but the architecture itself has much to say about the importance given to the productive cycle. Or at least this is what i can perceive. I don’t really understand the function of those glass and steel structures alternating the space: maybe they were roofs for security exits, but there are no stairs and i doubt that time has destroyed all of them: at least few steps would still be thre. Underneath the roofing there’s a yellow rusty sign, in terrible conditions. I can’t read, from where i am, what thre’s written on, but for sure it has been thre for a long time. Beside the architecture it looks like the only trace left of what has been the place. I hope they don’t throw it away with the restauration, otherwize they could give to me as a keepsake of my wanderings. I have the suspicion that i’ll be back in this area soon. It’s very big, and all i’ve seen is the side on Morimondo street. I still have to see the side on the canal and the one on Lodovico il Moro avenue. It looks like there are many interesting things over there.
