Let's continue the architecture thread that started on Monday by looking at one recent collection partially inspired by this discipline. Entitled "The Last Swan", Johnny Talbot and Adrian Runhof's S/S 16 collection moves from the recent Rizzoli tome dedicated to Italian noblewoman, socialite and art collector Marella Caracciolo.
Dubbed by Richard Avedon "the swan" for her long and sinuous neck, Caracciolo, who often appeared in early pictures documenting the birth of Italian fashion, married in 1953 Fiat tycoon Gianni Agnelli.
Marella Agnelli's carefree and effortless style and elegance was evoked in Talbot Runhof's practical tunics paired with slippers, a look around which the design duo created a narrative.
They imagined indeed Agnelli waking in Portofino, throwing a tunic on top of her husband's tuxedo shirt and a random pair of satin slippers, and running off to the market to buy porcini mushrooms and fresh flowers or sitting on her yacht enjoying the sunset in a printed chiffon pantsuit.
Marella's passion for fabrics (she worked as a high fashion and interior textile designer) was replicated in the luxurious textiles such as linen embedded with tiny sequins or hand-encrusted with guipure lace .
The geometric prints in the second part of Talbot Runhof's collection referenced instead Agnelli's old Fiat factory in Turin and re-balanced the collection from a luxurious and elitist mood to a more industrial inspiration.
The Italian automobile company FIAT (Factory of Italian Automobiles of Turin) led by Gianni Agnelli started building the Lingotto Factory in Turin in 1916. For this project Agnelli was inspired by iconic American multistory concrete factories, such as Albert Kahn's 1912 design for Henry Ford in the Highland Park Plant, Detroit.
Designed by engineer Giacomo Matté Trucco (who was fascinated by the work of French engineer François Hennébique), the Lingotto, considered as one of the first modular structures in Europe, was characterised by an unprecedented scale for European industries: its complex consisted indeed in a rectangular production building with smaller buildings for pre-assembly work and a separate office building (the palazzina).
Though the management offices looked more traditional, the production building was often compared to a skyscraper lying on its side and it consisted in two long workshops running parallel for a third of a mile connected at the ends and creating an elongated ring. The sides were linked by towers at regular intervals. The south end included a square press-shop; the north a five-story building part of the assembly workshop.
Assembly started on the ground floor then the cars would be taken up spiral ramps to consecutive upper floors for further assembly and finally to the roof for a test drive on the track (the opposite of the Ford system that would see the auto parts taken to the top floor and then the car was assembled as it descended to the lower floors).
The Lingotto's modular concrete grid featured over 2,000 steel multiple-panel windows, but one main feature remains the one-kilometer long rooftop test track (it briefly features in the getaway sequence in the film The Italian Job). Cars could be tested at speeds up to 60 miles an hour, while the two poured in place spiral ramps at the north and south ends of the factory were used to move cars to the roof track for testing or for hand trucks and pulling car parts floor to floor.
Many architects were struck by the building: featured in the magazine of the De Stijl group, G, in 1922, the building was praised by Le Corbusier who, considering the factory the ultimate temple to progress and speed, a structure that exemplified the aesthetic triumph of engineering, stated about it "Surely one of industry's most impressive sights...It is the Esprit Nouveau factory, useful in its precision and with the greatest clarity, elegance and economy."
Part of the emergency plans for post World War I assistance, the factory was bombed in 1943, but the structure resisted and, after the plant closed in the 1980s (by 1939 Fiat Mirafiori designed by Vittorio Bonade Bottino began to replace the Lingotto), Renzo Piano won a competition to turn the building into a modern complex. The old factory was therefore transformed in a centre with concert halls, theatre, a convention centre, shopping arcades and a hotel.
Since the factory had five floors, with raw materials going in at the ground floor, and cars built on a line that went up through the building and finished cars emerged at rooftop level to go onto the test track, there were critics who highlighted a Baroque quality to the complex - the materials to make a car were indeed "elevated" and "spiritualised" creating an "ascension" parallel.
Though Talbot Runhof developed their own Lingotto prints for this collection, replicating the windows of the complex on floor-sweeping loose caftans and simple tunics or jackets, they seemed to be in a hurry to finish it to have the time to stop and learn more about the structure and employ some of its most interesting features in their designs. There were indeed no references to the clean lines and curves of the building or to more technical industrial elements (apart from hexagonal motifs representing gears and cogs...), details that may have turned into intriguing additions to the collection, offering it some much needed variation.
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