New York’s Steel Soul

There are stories in which the sweat of a small workshop ultimately reaches, quite literally, for the sky. It all began in 1949 in Porcia, in a postwar Friuli searching for redemption, where Armando and Albina Cimolai founded a modest metal construction company. In that borderland, Armando, trained as a blacksmith “in the workshop,” forged iron with millimetric precision and care, embodying a Piedmontese work ethic that his son Luigi would later transform into a global powerhouse. Seventy years later, that legacy crossed the ocean to rewrite the skyline of New York. When walking through Manhattan and looking up toward the futuristic Hudson Yards district, one is admiring a steel soul born in Pordenone. The gigantic metal modules of the Edge terrace, the highest open-air observation deck in the Western Hemisphere, suspended 1,131 feet above the ground, were preassembled in Italy and challenged the Atlantic crossing in enormous sections aboard ships before being fitted together among the clouds with a surgical tolerance of just three millimeters. But Friulian construction expertise does not stop there. It also shaped the Vessel, a monumental, shimmering copper-colored beehive rising sixteen stories into the sky. A vertiginous geometric sculpture that challenges gravity with breathtaking numbers: 154 interconnected flights of stairs, 2,800 steps to climb, and 80 panoramic platforms. A gigantic metal heart that imposes no predetermined paths, but instead invites visitors to lose themselves, rediscovering with every step a new perspective over the Hudson. Today, this Italian company, which also created the movable roof of The Shed, represents the invisible framework behind American beauty. It is the poetic demonstration of how the sound of an old provincial anvil can resonate all the way to the top of the world, transforming the solid iron of Friuli into the crystal and light of the most iconic metropolis of all time.