Leonardo Ricci and the Project for the “Man-Machine Space”: the Goti Factory (1959)

The Goti factory was built between 1959 and 1960, when Ricci was managing to translate into reality some fundamental principles of his spatial research: the design method of the “form-act”, the community ideal and the anonymous, relational and existential architecture. This text aims to frame the project in Ricci’s work and clarify these design ideals and how they are found in the analyzed project, exploiting the reading of archival sources and contemporary projects or with a similar program. Furthermore, the Goti Factory is placed in the years in which Ricci begins an intense exchange with the United States, which will allow him to approach the founding theories of Urban Design, therefore to resolve, thanks to them, that tension between opposites that animated his research, finally reaching the definitive evolution of his design method.