Ephemeral Heritage. Steel Housing Prototypes of Triennale Milano

The prototype played a decisive role in the process of the progressive industrialization in the building sector and especially in the XX century, when the collaboration between industrials and designers led to the realization of a first real scale object to verify benefits of the design process and, eventually, to start the series production. One of the most meaningful locations for prototypes exhibition was the Triennale of Milan; since 1930s it fostered the cultural debate about architectural design and production with the display in the Parco Sempione of original building patterns so as to evaluate potentialities released by new technologies and among them steel building. It is no coincidence that steel construction was widely used in the Triennale both in the first and second half of XX century, especially for housing that represented one of the central topics for the building sector and the Italian designers. The steel buildings displayed in the Triennale were an expression of desire for cultural and technological experimentation, but also represented an “ephemeral heritage” considering their provisional status only linked to the exhibition period. The contribution aims to retrace design and construction of the most meaningful prototypes of steel housing buildings of Triennale not only with archival documentation, but also with the use of digital models that could be fundamental tools to rediscover the peculiarities of these lost architectures.