The company as a site of encounter: interview with Marco Tronchetti Provera

This article was originally published on Domus 1048 Diary, July-August issue. “The Pirelli world is held together by structure: from training to welfare activities. There are gyms for classes on yoga, mindfulness, pilates. And rooms for seminars with wall-size windows. The cafeteria is now a restaurant. When the weather is nice, you can eat outdoors, overlooking the Arcimboldi hunting grounds. A flexible, sustainable place that perfectly joins tradition and modernity, two traits typical of the Pirelli brand. The new building represents us”. Marco Tronchetti Provera, Pirelli executive vice-president and CEO, becomes a bit emotional with Domus about the Building Cinturato which just opened at Bicocca. More than the new company headquarters, it is an upgrade in the relations between a company, society and the environment. “The new building is a contemporary place for socialising. A world that expresses identity, to which people can relate. Now that working at home is part of our life, a place like this is where you can meet others and exchange ideas”.

Is this an all-Pirelli revolution?
I’d call it an evolution, as has always been the case in Pirelli’s history. From a place of creation and process, the company is gradually changing into a modern site of encounter.

You used two adjectives that today are important: sustainable and flexible.
They define the spirit of the choice we made among seven architecture studios. We selected the design that convinced us the most. It was a choice made on the inside with the heads of our departments: from human resources and all the functions that followed the realisation of this project.

Didn’t you intervene during the process?
I tried to launch the idea and coordinate the sectors that enthusiastically embraced and realised this project. Teamwork.

Let’s get back to sustainability and flexibility.
Sustainability is social and environmental, dimensions that have always gone hand in hand. They are part of Pirelli’s history: like in the factory we built in Settimo Torinese with Renzo Piano, where common spaces join the former factory with a new building, always attempting to make the company a place where you don’t just work – you also live. Exactly like our office in Milan, which also has a library for its employees.

A company, not as a place of production, but socialisation.
A company that produces, obviously, but is also a place of encounter where people must spend a period of time that never lacks quality and, when possible, beauty, too. A place for work that is different from the past, where only the values remain intact. The rest changes. More flexible in the spaces and hours and more tailored to our employees, who achieve more in a pleasing environment. The classic idea of a company is over. There’s the production part, which is more automatised, with greater attention to work loads and hours. Then there are the offices, where the need to be physically present is less, thanks to new technologies.

How come companies are identified more and more by their common areas?
Because when symbolic values increase, physical ones decrease, along with dimensions, structures. People are calmer when in addition to working in a place, they can also relate to and feel represented by it. In this, we at Pirelli are lucky because we have almost 150 years of experience under our belt.