Why you should experience Pirelli in Milan, Italy.
Pirelli is an indelible industrial campus where Bicocca's postindustrial character meets Milanese manufacturing history, technological research and the architectural reinvention of a factory district shaped across more than a century.
Set along Viale Piero e Alberto Pirelli near Viale Sarca and just steps from Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, the headquarters occupies an expansive northern Milan precinct where corporate buildings, landscaped grounds, university blocks and surviving industrial structures spread across territory once dominated by immense factories and railway sidings. A ten-story glass office cube encloses three sides of an earlier reinforced-concrete cooling tower, turning a piece of heavy industrial infrastructure into the physical center of the headquarters. A vast glazed fourth elevation exposes the tower toward the surrounding grounds, as aerial walkways connect its converted internal levels with offices around the perimeter. The preserved structure rises through the contemporary building as a visible measure of the manufacturing complex that preceded the present campus. The result is a headquarters whose architecture places Pirelli's industrial past directly inside the physical form created for its later research and corporate operations.
What you should know about Pirelli.
Pirelli is best known for developing from Giovanni Battista Pirelli's pioneering Milanese rubber works into an international manufacturer whose expansion helped turn Bicocca into one of Italy's principal twentieth-century industrial districts. Pirelli graduated in industrial engineering from the Politecnico in 1870, then used a European study journey spanning 138 factories to investigate industries that included textiles, mechanics, railways, metallurgy and the still-young rubber trade. Twenty-four partners supplied the capital for G.B. Pirelli & C., founded on January 28, 1872 with 215,000 lire and Antoine-Aimé Goulard as its first technical director. Production began the following year beside the Sevesetto on Via Ponte Seveso with forty workers and five office employees manufacturing belts, valves and rubber hoses. Electrical conductors followed in 1879, rubber components for carriage wheels in 1885 and pneumatic bicycle tires during the 1890s, expanding the industrial applications that had already exhausted much of the original site. Automobile tire production began in 1901, followed in 1902 by a factory at Villanueva y Geltrú near Barcelona that marked a decisive stage in the company's international expansion. Milanese growth simultaneously forced Pirelli outward: land between Greco and Niguarda was selected in 1906 for its railway connections and distance from the increasingly constrained central factory. The Bicocca plant followed in 1908, establishing the industrial center that absorbed further production as Pirelli expanded through cables, rubber goods and tires. Scipione Borghese's victory in the 1907 Peking to Paris race aboard an Itala equipped with Pirelli tires connected the company's technical development with international motor competition at the same moment its new Milanese manufacturing center was taking shape. Pirelli's expansion consequently joined engineering education, rubber technology, export production and motorsport within an industrial enterprise whose physical growth became inseparable from northern Milan.
The present headquarters preserves a separate architectural mechanism born from the dismantling of that manufacturing landscape during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Pirelli and Milan began addressing the future of the immense Bicocca holdings during the 1980s, and an international competition led to Vittorio Gregotti and Gregotti Associati directing the redevelopment. Leopoldo Pirelli championed a plan that shifted the former production district toward research, education and advanced corporate functions without erasing every component of its industrial fabric. One surviving element acquired exceptional importance: the reinforced-concrete cooling tower belonging to the autonomous thermoelectric plant built after the Second World War to support continuous factory production. Gregotti Associati retained that 46-meter structure inside the new headquarters, enclosing it with a ten-story cube measuring 50 meters on each side. Three sides contain offices; the fourth is formed by an 1,800-square-meter glass wall weighing 168 tonnes, leaving the tower exposed as the building's internal centerpiece. Its hyperbolic profile narrows from a diameter of 32 meters at the base to 22 meters at the summit. Conversion placed an auditorium at ground level and meeting rooms on higher levels, connected to surrounding offices through suspended walkways. The headquarters made preservation of industrial infrastructure the organizing device for a new corporate building, turning a structure once required to maintain factory production into the spatial center of Pirelli's postindustrial Bicocca presence.
How to fold Pirelli into your trip.
Pirelli works as the anchor for a daytime exploration of Bicocca through three nearby sites that move from the district's surviving Renaissance ancestry through a theater created during its postindustrial reconstruction into an immense factory converted for contemporary art.
Begin at Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, the fifteenth-century country residence whose name eventually passed to the surrounding district. Built for the Arcimboldi family during the second half of the century, the villa later moved through several Milanese owners before entering the property assembled around the emerging industrial quarter. Ambrogio Annoni directed a major restoration in 1910 after agricultural conversion and later alterations had obscured substantial portions of its Renaissance architecture. Pirelli acquired the property in 1918 and later established the villa as an official reception venue, preserving an aristocratic building within territory transformed by twentieth-century manufacturing. Continue to Teatro degli Arcimboldi, designed by Vittorio Gregotti and constructed between 1997 and 2002 as redevelopment gave Bicocca a major performing-arts institution. Milan and Pirelli collaborated on the project as Teatro alla Scala prepared for renovation of its historic building. The new theater opened on January 19, 2002 with Verdi's La traviata conducted by Riccardo Muti, and its stage was engineered to accommodate three opera productions simultaneously. La Scala transferred its seasons there during the restoration of its Piermarini home, making Gregotti's theater a temporary center of Milanese opera and a defining cultural component of the reconstructed district. Conclude at Pirelli HangarBicocca, where a former Breda manufacturing complex preserves another branch of the industrial territory that once surrounded Pirelli. Ernesto Breda moved production into Bicocca from 1903, and the surviving Shed was producing locomotive and agricultural-machine components by the first half of the 1920s. Breda Elettromeccanica e Locomotive added the Cubo in 1955, followed between 1963 and 1965 by the 9,500-square-meter Navate for assembling and testing high-powered transformers. Conversion into an exhibition institution began in 2004, and Anselm Kiefer created The Seven Heavenly Palaces for its opening, constructing seven reinforced-concrete towers weighing 90 tonnes apiece and rising between 13 and 19 meters inside the former industrial volume. The progression moves from the Arcimboldi family's Renaissance villa through Gregotti's theater for Milanese opera into Breda's colossal production halls repurposed for Kiefer's towers, revealing three surviving layers of the territory that developed around Pirelli's century-long presence in Bicocca.
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