Frontiers
PIETRO SALINI
Infra - structure. The base, the support, the structure that is essential to socio-economic development. The etymology of this word instantly makes us think about what underlies our communal living, about works that enable people’s potential and, in many cases, determine the fate of entire communities, beyond frontiers.
These are the infrastructures that produce renewable water and energy, improve mobility and exchanges, create economies of scale and specialization, and trigger processes of development that, over time, improve the overall capacity of whole systems. The greater the relations developed between interconnected populations, the greater the well-being generated in the areas involved.
This book is a journey in pictures across the works that Webuild has been building for over 115 years all around the world, crossing all sorts of cultural, social, political, and physical barriers. A timeless journey without a specific place, across works born from the intelligence and labor of thousands of men, separated by frontiers, but united in their instinct to create and build.
It is a journey beyond political and cultural borders that encourages creativity and building skills to transcend the limits imposed by the spaces, toward new destinations crossing rivers, mountains, and plains. But above all it is a journey through the faces of those people who use their hands to create beautiful and functional works, with dozens of professions to be safeguarded and handed down, skills that are almost artisanal in nature to be carried over into the world of industry 4.0, and to be reinforced through the use of science and technology.
In these pages the photographs describe the Group’s works from different points of view and reveal moments and gestures that had been hidden from sight: thanks to industrial photography, which has always contributed to describing society’s trends and evolution, the work and the day-to-day nature of the building site become the protagonists, allowing the reader to re-experience the production process that leads to the improvement of cities and
whole countries.
Urban planning is policy, it means deciding how people live and how they move around, how they meet and how they work. Planning major infrastructures for the city or for a region signifies deciding how we live and which development models we choose to adopt.
The crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the process of investing in new infrastructures in transportation, energy, water, building, both in terms of the planning of the works and in regard to the upkeep of obsolete ones. And this is being done with renewed attention to sustainable investment, in order to create the sort of future society that we want, interpreting the crisis as a challenge and an opportunity to roll up our sleeves and start all over again from hard work. To make a better society for everyone.
Pietro Salini
Chief Executive Officer of Webuild Group
