Business Center Of Turin Case Study

1962 : Business Centre of Turin. Project for a Competition with G. U. Polesello and L. Meda.

A PURIST APPROACH Aldo Rossi with his two contributors Luca Meda and Gian Ugo Polesello participated in 1962 to the competition for the Office District of Turin (Centro Direzionale). They called this closed blade of housing and offices, 140 meters high, delimiting a square on which lays a dome : the ‘Locomotiva’ which makes an undeniable reference to corbusean searches.
Their proposal is characterized by a shape of a large square «ring» and a depth of 20 m long. The building is structurally composed with by several peripherical round pillars containing vertical circulation and services. These pillars are free on 30 m high, (height) from where the
Even if none of the projects made by the most influential architects of the time will be realized, the competition will be a symbol of the 1960s urban debate in a context of economic boom and of the tertiarisation episod (a period while several others Directional Centers will be debated like in Milan in 1953, from Roma, Padova, Bergamo to Florence in 1976).
The winner team of the competition was ‘Akropolis 9’ directed by Ludovico Quaroni, which proposed a set of towers, of 120m high composed with blocks which emerged from a ‘plate’ as a new ‘urban floor’ with a progression of public space from north to south, from cultural to tertial activities. Besides the great debate that was initiated around the issue of this type of program, all the projects presented had the ambition of megastructural projects, in a shape of compact ‘object’ (superblock) or of tower(s) and initiated debate around the vertical development of the city which will be traduced in 1964 by the highrise Sip by Ottonino Aloisio.
Author of ‘La Costruzione Logica dell’Architettura’ in 1967, Giorgio Grassi much influenced by Ludwig Hilberseimer and Adolf Loos (like Aldo Rossi) promoted an extremely formal and rational work characterized by simplicity refering to historical archetypes of form and space. As Rossi, he wrote that « one of the most interesting investigation methodology is the classification of the elements of archtitecture ». A quote which perfectly resume his intentions in the project that interests us. In order to close we can briefly give the image of another perspective with a more radical way adopted by Vittorio Gregotti, author of ‘Il territorio dell’architettura’ the same year as ‘L’Architettura della Città’ and promote the complete ’autonomy’ of the architectural objects which can be illustrated by his project in Cosenza in 1978 the ’Università della