arcVision 5 – Trasparency

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Less management, more leadership. Business is changing, as are markets, consumers and business management models.

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In his unforgettable and prophetic “Lezioni Americane” (American Lessons), Italo Calvino created a lucid and straightforward introduction to the third millennium which he filtered into five categories: lightness, rapidity, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. It can be considered an ante litteram definition of the world of the Internet; a five-faced metaphor that can also be applied to companies. These are new businesses that, abandoning habits and consolidated customs, have developed a need for new instruments; new ways of thinking about their work. Original concepts are being developed, like Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence; an indispensable attitude for tomorrow’s leaders; an alternative and potential complement to traditional technical and rational abilities. Unexpected structural models emerge, like the “network” organization in which the company is a knot within a greater “value-creation system,” one that requires, according to Carlo Alberto Carnevale, new models of strategic management. Businesses, Roger Abravanel believes, will become progressively and increasingly oriented toward globalization and innovation. This last idea is an increasingly vast concept that is being applied not only to technology, but also to internal processes and people.

In fact the manager’s role is changing; he is becoming increasingly less an “administrator” and increasingly more a “leader” – one who “convinces his employees to do things that they consider impossible, and, furthermore, he helps them to accomplish these things.” He will be a guide with great strategic vision, clarity in the definition of objectives and possessing extreme reactivity. The profile, outlined by Eric Salmon, is completed within the in-depth examination by Roberto Vaccani, including an analysis of the relationship within the work area between commitment and pleasure, to the search for a balance that is adapted to the needs of the new work realities.

In the Projects section, the concept of visibility has become absolute in transparency, architectural research for greater communication between inside and outside; a primitive need that Gillo Dorfles follows from its origins, between exaltation and oblivion, until reaching the current explosion. The expanded metal screens in the Houten gas station, the “curtain wall” of the Charlemagne Building, the rotating glass walls in Autostadt, the car city in Wolfsburg, are the expressions of a language that has made understatement its credo: lightness again, in the name of an architecture that treats surfaces as if they were information. Wall-mediums, interface between living space and people, with the transparency acting as an intelligent “skin,” capable of mutating the physicality of cement into a “dream matter” as in the Ehime Museum of Science. In order to arrive at an urban metaphor for the IMAX Cinema in London, in which the outer layer in structural glass amplifies and reverberates the identity of a great communication center to the external world.

The News section, containing information from all over Italcementi Group’s world, features the 130,000 cubic meters of concrete supplied by Asia Cement for the construction of the Emporium Tower, chronicles of the celebrations for Cementos Rezola’s 150th anniversary, the National Prize for Quality given to Ciments du Maroc, the “ecological” experience of Ciments Calcia and the exhibition by Steven Holl in Milan, Italy within the framework of the “Incontri Millenium”.

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