Michelin House: 81 Fulham Road, Chelsea.
François Espinasse, 1911¹

here’s a place to drink up 
all the obstacles the low debris 
the brown glass horseshoe nuts and bolts
the miles the hours the mediocre fare
      to smoke at last the sickly competition 
      and really tread the earth 

it would’ve been illegal to sell rubber here
but Dunlop’s rights expired in ’04
and Michelin sent a staff of four 
      then hired fourteen more then twenty more
      to set up shop in Sussex Place then here

in porcelain and ferro-concrete 
brighter glasses fireproof hollow floors 
chiselled monograms and automatic doors
in iron tendrils drive-in weighing stations 
       and booming roadside toasts
       to the unceasing house of tyre

Fiat Lingotto Factory, Turin
Matté Trucco, 1923²

nor do I sit at this circus a student of the vehicle
more beautiful more eaglespread than Victory 

nor the radiant townplanner divining 
nor an apologist for the wreckage

only to navigate the circles of the concrete
which looks to nothing else besides

bringing that vehicle into motion
before it has limbs to move

Victory 
before arms 

and until then 
I sit here a student

1. The Michelin House in Chelsea, London was originally built as the HQ of the Michelin Tyre company, and is now home to a high-end restaurant. The building itself is interesting for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, it’s an extremely practical structure, perfectly constructed for storing, selling, and fitting tyres. On the other hand, it’s also a three-dimensional embodiment of the fantasy with which the Michelin brand – since its inception – has attempted to associate itself: the idea that one can better oneself via hedonism (a fantasy in which the building’s present day patrons continue to indulge). The piece alludes to the Horacian ode “Nunc est Bibendum” – “Now’s the time to drink” –  from which the Michelin mascot takes his name. Only, where that poem is sincere in advocating eternal celebration, mine is meant to be ironic – it’s intended to be critical of the fantasy of self-betterment through pleasure.
2. The Lingotto Factory is often hailed as the first Futurist building, due to its refusal to mimic historical architectural styles, and to its absolute devotion to its own function – the construction of motorcars. The floors of the building form an ascending spiral, with a racetrack on top, so that car parts can enter on the bottom story, and, as they ascend the spiral, be assembled into fully-functioning vehicles which exit at the top.
   
   Vehicles were themselves of enormous importance to the Italian futurists. Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto of 1909 even declared a racing car to be more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace (a Greek sculpture of the Godess Nike, now in the Louvre and missing both its head and its arms). The same manifesto also begins with a description of the author emerging from a car accident.
   
   The factory now functions as an arts and entertainment centre, though this use is overshadowed somewhat by the building’s political history. It was constructed under Mussolini (of whom the Futurists were open admirers) and, in the minds of some, is therefore tarnished by its association with the political and moral catastrophes of that regime: particularly, Mussolini’s obsession with winning military victory and his desire to revive, through belligerent means, the former glory of the Roman empire – a desire which was far in excess of Italy’s actual military power. Le Corbusier saw in the factory a model of town planning – though he too had strong links to Fascism.
   
   My feeling is that we can continue to admire the building without being admirers of the Futurists, Mussolini, Corbusier, or even Fiat cars. We can do so, not because the Factory succeeds in breaking from architectural tradition, but because it fails: it bears an explicit resemblance to the Circus Maximus of ancient Rome – where the poet Ovid set part 3.2 of his Amores. My poem alludes to the Ovid in an attempt to stress the likeness between the two structures, and inorder to reimagine the Lingotto factory as a sort of modern-day ruin, a latter-day Ozymandias: a monument which testifies, in retrospect, to the failures of the regimes that produced it, and which is aesthetically important because – rather than in spite – of those failures.