ITER - Palazzo degli affari della Camera di commercio

The business building of the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture of Turin (now Chamber of Commerce for Industry, Agriculture and Handicraft) is the result of the victory in the pitch announced in 1964, in which Carlo Mollino took part under the “Treperuno” slogan already used for the previous pitch for the Cagliari theater, together with Alberto Galardi, Carlo Graffi and Antonio Migliasso.

The building, although it is the result of several variations made to the initial project during a rather difficult building site that was finished in 1973 only (the building was opened after Mollino’s death in August 1973), in its general lines it remains loyal to the initial idea, which intended to erect a building with extremely modern shapes and layout in the historical center of Turin (it is a site that lies within the 17th century expansion of the town).

From the distribution point of view, the designers set the Business Building around two different buildings originally connected by a metal footbridge that has now been replaced because of the requirements established in the current fire prevention regulations: the actual building and a wing unit with four overground floors destined for offices to be let and designed as a closing for the backside courtyard.

The main building, with five overground and two underground floors, which initially were to be accompanied by a multistory car park, is vertically connected with a central service hub (stairwells and lifts). It consists of an entrance basement that fits within the 18th century urban fabric like a new and modern block, a mezzanine reserved for partly outdoor parking area open on the four sides, and the compact office unit, covered by a sloping roof under which is a luxury appartment. The architectural element characterizing the outside is prefabricated sheet walls that, alternatively to the popular sheet wall system, take their constitutive modular elements (the constant distance between centers of windows is one meter) from aeronautical constructions. The supporting structure of the building is the result of an intuition of Antonio Migliasso, one of the original members of the Treperuno group, later replaced by Felice Bertone. Migliasso, one of the major architects in Italy, designed the entire building on a tree-shaped structure, consisting of the hollow, reinforced concrete core of the staircases and lifts, which supports the floors through a series of trusses located on top of the building (and fully visible when visiting the top floors of the building) and precompressed reinforced concrete trusses positioned at regular intervals behind the uninterrupted façade. The use of this system, which makes the Turin Business Building one of the first, if not the very first, examples of a suspended structure in Italy, guarantees an excellent flexibility to the internal layout. The interiors of the Business Building, fittings, finishes and partition elements were commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce to Mollino in 1971, but unfortunately they have since been lost.

Located in the very heart of the city, it stands next to the Stock Exchange of Piazzale Valdo Fusi (Francesco Dolza et al, 1995-2004); not far from there, in via Giolitti 18, is Gino Becker and Giorgio Rosenthal’s valuable, combined office and residential building (1960). The rearrangement of the Museum of Natural Science in the old St. John’s Hospital (on the opposite side of the square by Andrea Bruno, also deserve a visit.