Steel construction for a new public company. The RAI executive offices

The reference horizon of the Italian companies during the years of “boom economico” one part is the development of modern industrial capitalism and the other part the cultural context of a predominantly rural country until then. Among the different growth sectors also the communication in which the RAI company, Italian Radio Auditions, get, in January 1952, the Convention for the management of the national television service. The Rai buildings, one for the Milan office, designed by G. Ponti in 1939, the Rome office, by F. Berarducci and A. Fioroni in 1959 and the Turin skyscraper, by A. Morbelli and D. Morelli in 1961, than to represent the company's philosophy of an organization producing communication and culture, become, in the collective dream-up, symbol of the progress and of the economic and social change of those years. Selecting in particular, the Turin and Rome experiences, with the realization of the General Head Offices, the present work analyses how of steel construction, to which is entrust the technical and formal solution of two buildings, becomes a field for design and construction experimentation of new and efficient architecture. The experimentation on the resistant structure of the steel pipe, developed by Costruzioni Metalliche Finsider for both buildings and the research made by Alsco Malugani company, for Turin skyscraper and Curtisa company for Rome head office, represent, in Italian context, a meaningful phase of traditional building technologies overcoming in favour of those prefabricated and pre-assembled in the works, using standardized procedures, obtaining a process of simplification and advanced of the assembly techniques and a rationalization of the cost and the time. The reading of the technicalconstructional and architectural characters of these buildings, that it is multi-storey or high-rise buildings, highlights the complexity and multidisciplinary nature of the topic. The reading of the technical-constructional and architectural characters of these buildings, that it is multi-storey or high-rise buildings, highlights the complexity and multidisciplinary nature of the topic: from the designer's role as a director of a team work, to the need of mediation with the client and with the economic logic; from the conditioning about the urban location, to the difficulty of integrating of a modern building in the historical context; from the morphological definition of the work spaces and the search for high performance of environmental comfort to the project of the facade solutions targeted to industrialized processes or resolved in the uniqueness of detail solutions.