If we want to better understand the spirit that moves our times, we might agree that the word that best sums it up is the word renewal. Ours is a time in which the desire and the demand for renewal can no longer be held back and are at last within our reach. This is a phenomenon that will inevitably involve everyone and everything very quickly. So it would be sensible to try to understand what it means, what the stakes are, who the main players of the game are, and most of all, how we intend to experience this point in time. 

Already 15 years have passed since the turn of the century, and now we realise that we are still living in the midst of histories and attitudes that were all determined and established in the latter part of the 20th century. Amazing technological advances and astounding digital innovations have given us the sensation and the illusion of having moved into the future, only to realise instead that we have entered it under the same old rules and systems, the same old habits and old ways of doing things, as if everything had remained unchanged. We need to pass into the new century with our minds and not only our means, but we have not done this yet.

For proof of all this, you only have to look at the activities to which we apply ourselves. The majority of these remain anchored to a world that no longer exists, a world, we can now say, that had stopped thinking about the future and the people who would inhabit it. The closing years of the past century and the first few of this one were used as a sort of free port, where everybody thought of themselves first, and to do it better, they became part of groups, associations and political parties – not out of conviction, passion, or ideals, but only because that was the best way to ensure a comfortable present for themselves.

As a result, our public structures such as administration, health care and schools were filled with people not interested in their work but only in personal gain. The same thing happened with the liberal professions, from engineers to architects and from lawyers to doctors, where work was sought and obtained not based on professional capabilities but string-pulling and knowing the right people. This extended to the variegated circles of industry and commerce which, just in order to operate, found it simpler to adjust to what was happening around them rather than assert their own capacities and competences.

This concentration on personal gain – with no regard to a more comprehensive framework within the dynamics of a community that focuses not only on its present but above all on its future – created a kind of Wild West, with everyone thinking only of their own interests and benefits. Instead of emancipating us and making us freer, the fall of ideologies simply left us further out on a limb. We filled this isolation with expedients that soon escalated into a veritable system, offering opportunities to shady dealers, crooks and large numbers of bunglers.

The most striking consequence of all this has been the incredible growth of the public debt, accumulated by a system completely uninterested in the collectivity, to the advantage of the individual. This has allowed many to make easy profits quickly, while dumping the ensuing problems on future generations. That this would bring disaster rapidly was clear to many from the start. But life is stronger than all the obvious, and so it was easier to look the other way, to take advantage of the situation.

This time, therefore, we want to turn to our industrialists and entrepreneurs, to the best of them, to those who despite all odds have managed to stay on course in these very complicated recent years. We need all your capabilities, all your visionariness and enthusiasm, guts and determination. At other moments, even recently, Italy and its enterprises have proven their capacity to compete with anyone anywhere, conquering markets and gaining respect, and in some sectors becoming positively invincible.

In the world of homes and habitation for example, we have succeeded in producing and innovating like few others, with an entrepreneurship made up primarily of people rather than numbers, where companies are not preordained but spring from somebody’s ideas, which if feasible, can become hugely successful and contagious. This proven capacity of Italian entrepreneurs in the sectors of habitation – from the construction world to design – to make the outer shelter and the products needed for us to live better, is something that’s in our blood and widely acclaimed, even though in the past few years this industry has been battling against big odds, due mainly to what we have been talking about here.

So we are making an appeal to entrepreneurs. What we need now is for you to put your skills and ideas at the service of contemporary humanity, and apply them to the most urgent issues, but also to subject them to the judgement of the dreams and new desires that our times kindles and cultivates. The advancing new circumstances need you and your enterprising spirit, your unique way of working that distinguishes your products and makes them so particular. Maybe what makes you hard to imitate is the fact that you continue, in absolute contrast to the global concept of entrepreneurship, to place trust in human beings, while the others rely mainly on machines and regard human effort as less trustworthy.

This sort of humanism has come to the present from a long way back and is not easily reconciled with contemporary production, which seeks at all costs to leave human beings out and regards them more as a problem than a resource. Unlike machines, humans are considered hard to control and therefore a means to be used as little as possible.

What was once guaranteed by craftsmanship has now been lost by global industry. But it’s not that way for our best industrial manufacturers who, each in their own manner, have managed to keep craftsmanship as an added value, even in the era of technical reproducibility. Today you can claim this record, and we are sure that this approach of yours can help us make a fresh start. Your know-how can get this country to undertake the renewal that it so badly needs. This renewal would allow us to be considered for what we do, and not for who supports us or for the groups that we belong to.

At this moment, your way of conducting business, your matchless strength acquired from indefatigable men and women who are proud of what they do, are what make you unique and competitive once more on the global market, in a new world desperately trying to assert itself. You are unique because you possess something that cannot be bought, that is not on the market: something incomparable that can only be admired and envied.

Your new competitiveness will be gauged by your answers to the new demand that is now being formed, and by your capacity to spread your outlook, which most of the time subverts the good rules of any manual, or of any written guideline. It is important to circulate this culture and this approach to industry as an indispensable part of civilised society, the territory and the community to which it belongs, and never as something that stands alone.

The great Adriano Olivetti made all this his credo and principal weapon, and managed as a result to astonish the world, albeit working mainly with and for his community. Within the general sphere of companies working in the field of habitation, what we have said so far applies to manufacturers chiefly concerned with design. Companies concerned with building, and hence with realising and constructing the containers of our living, deserve a separate address. Historic cities are the recognised and evident symbol of our capacity for living, and hence of our knowing how to construct for living, but they also demonstrate our ability to reinhabit what was inhabited in the past.

We know that in this sector, too, there are examples of excellence that could do a lot to renew our built environment.  If this sector could get back on track, the whole country can recover. That is why it so important for the best in this field to step forward, to make their intelligence and competence available. We have an entire country to modernise. Not laws or plans are lacking, but the awareness that this modernisation is what has to be done and that we have everything needed to achieve it in the best possible way. We should work to accentuate these capacities, to the point where we can no longer do without them. Civilised society is loudly demanding this, and our best enterprises must now strive to supply the right answer.

America is right here in Italy, too. Let us boldly embrace this renewal and see who else is ready to embark upon it, politicians included. We ourselves can make the first move; the times are ripe and we don’t want to be robbed of our future yet again. So let us join forces to determine and shape our future. Let us stop arguing and plunge into the third millennium. At this point in time, it is indispensible for us that we start out from our best enterprises, which is why we appeal to all those who are ready to listen and embark on paths different to those trodden to date.

Top: Milan, photo Archivi Domus