The garage that guarded dreams

Once upon a time in the heart of Milan a temple, a concrete and steel manifesto dedicated to the new deity of the 20th century, the automobile. A place where architecture became a manifesto, function became form, the useful was transformed into beauty. The year was 1956 and as Italy shook off the dust of war to dive into the economic miracle Quattroruote and the Garage of Nations were born. The one the monthly magazine that would follow the evolution of the car, its parabola from symbolic object to urban issue. The other a promise of the boom, where cars were not parked but desires, not means of transportation but aesthetic apparatuses, not goods but symbols of the latest religion, speed. Born in 1905, architect Antonio Cassi Ramelli had it all figured out. The car was becoming less and less a means of transportation and more and more a statement of intent, capable of shifting its trajectory of use into a perspective of meaning. From function to form, from form to symbol, from symbol to imaginary. And so the Milanese architect had wanted to design not a simple garage for sheets and pistons, wheels and headlights but a real architecture to house, protect and celebrate the symbols of the new cult, the relics of mechanics, the vestments of liturgy. Cars such as Gesammeltweke, in short, the total work of art yearned for throughout the nineteenth century, capable of shifting the construction of the ordinary into the register of the imaginary. 

At the Garage of Nations everything was along these lines. "At the entrance you are greeted in elegant green overalls by the hall attendants," the advertising brochure read, to remark that there were no "parking attendants" there but "hall attendants," as in an opera house, a museum, a palace of power. Because the car was precisely not a medium but an icon, a cultural device made almost entirely by hand and for that reason capable of constructing a canon, a mythology, an epic. In the same way the Garage of Nations, pure functionalist architecture, became poetry, elegy, symphony in the ramps screwed into the central space with a sinuous, almost sensual movement. An explicit quotation, albeit in sixteenth place, of the mythical Lingotto di Torino that the equally mythical Le Corbusier would have called "one of the most impressive spectacles that industry has ever offered." He was right this time, Le Corbu, because there cars were not manufactured but brought to light. 

In that now untraceable Milan, where Alfas and Lancias were no less than Ferraris and Lamborghinis and more than Aston Martins, Jaguars, and Mercedes, one could not only have the car but also a place to protect and safeguard it, perhaps only the two hours of a lunch in Loro Piana double-breasted suits and Bardelli shirts. The Garage of Nations was the answer to this desire for status, for representation, for class. An architecture that smelled of exclusivity, privilege, belonging, recognition who "had arrived" having made technological progress their flag. Always with the understatment, however. In the perspective of Domus, which was then already great, those ramps that intersected in space in search of an elsewhere, those pillars that supported the structure with lost grace confirmed Italian postwar architecture among the few capable of transforming function into beauty. And a garage into a declaration of love for aesthetics and politics. Thus in the heart of Milan a certain idea of modernity was taking shape, renewing Marinetti's foreboding born not far away: the automobile is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace. 

But times change and cities with them. And what Milan has become can be understood from many things, including the state of the Garage of Nations, which today is in danger of being sacrificed on the altar of urban regeneration. The Società Lombardia Parcheggi, which owns it, has decided to tear it down to build in its place a hotel complex dominated by two towers, one 14 and the other 9 stories. Less symbolic but more profitable. The only homage to the past would be an underground parking garage and the highly original name: Parking Hotel. Talk about creativity. But this Milanese story actually becomes an apologue for the whole of Italy, for all of us who in a few years have lost our sense of aesthetics, making it wreck not even in the economy but in crestomazia. We who by dint of not studying, not marveling, not looking up struggle to recognize the cultural value of buildings that seemingly functional but actually marked an era of the country. Because the Garage of Nations was not a garage but the symbol of a concrete and dreaming Italy, which believed in the future, which made the automobile an element of social identity, which wanted functional architecture that knew how to excite.

For the record, the legal battle has been going on for seven years. On one side is the Superintendency, which has understood the historic value of the building. On the other is the property, which sees only cubic meters to sell as the overwhelming amount of developers. For once, the entire city council had unanimously come out in defense of the Garage of Nations. A unique case in a lost city theater of a community that remembers nothing not so much about aesthetics or architecture but mostly about itself. Because it has lost its soul, that is, the link that holds together the past and the future, the earth and the sky. How it will end is unclear, although someone said that one always follows the universal will that at the moment works for today and not for tomorrow. If it does, we will not lose a building but a piece of history, made up of dreams, hopes and cars, which instead of generating poetry in the sky will go back to transporting people to the earth.

Opening image: © Gabriele Basilico/Archive Gabriele Basilico