Gran Torino Atlas - Chapter IV: The Bourgeois Turin

The publication results from a year-lasting collaboration between the Polytechnic University of Turin and Eindhoven Technical University’s Chair of Rational Architecture, guided by Professor Christian Rapp together with Haike Apelt as Dutch Supervisors and Professor Silvia Malcovati as Italian Supervisor. The exchange Project focused on the city of Turin and bears the name “Gran Torino Graduation Studio”. As the name itself would have probably already suggested to the reader, the work, in which sixteen students of both universities were involved, was focused on the city of Turin. That of the Atlas is a tradition which is typical of the Dutch method and is to be considered as the systematisation of all the work of analysis and research carried out in the first months of works within the whole Graduation Studio. Subject of these publication is the city of interest; Turin’s one was preceeded by others, like Amsterdam or Munich, always with the guide of Eindhoven Technical University’s Chair of Rational Architecture. The present Atlas is therefore to be seen as the final product of the research phase within the graduation track.The latter, which started indeed from a typo-morphological research and analysis on the architectures of the city, from its Roman past until the most recent times, finally concluded with sixteen individual designs developed from each single student’s research question, in which the outcomes of the first analysis were also taken into account. Gran Torino Atlas provides the reader with a complete overview on the city development, together with those architectural changes that accompanied it along the centuries. In order to unravel the long and complex story of the city, the Atlas has been structured in nine distinct chapters that cover the most important time periods and paradigms of the city, together with the consequent architectural changes. The book opens with a series of maps showing the evolution of Turin’s morphology beyond its original Roman borders. With this premises, each of the following chapters focuses on a different time period, considered remarkable in order to understand the morphological genesis and transformation of Turin. Each chapter tells the tale of an important time period for the city through its morphological genesis and transformation; its societal, political and economic paradigms and an in- depth assessment of its architectural culture. Each of the sections, as the reader will see, is structured according to three different levels, zooming in from the city scale until the building scale through the use of fragments. Reference is made, with this name, to those areas in the city which have been selected, one for each chapter, since they have been considered as exemplary in explaining and condensing the link of all historical events and the consequent architectural culture which resulted from them. The fourth chapter, in particular, focuses on the second half of the eighteenth century and on the urban development occurred in Turin due to industrialization and due to its consequent rise of the bourgeoisie, the wealthy middle class. As exemplary case of district developed within this context, the fourth chapter deepens the case of the surroundings of the central station "Porta Nuova",analyzing two typologies which can be considered equally representative of the bourgeoise Turin of those years: the block and the urban villa. The present contribution provides firstly the reader with an historical background on this important phase of modern history of Turin, then proceeds with the explanation of its urban consequences and on the illustration of the selected typologies, whose re-drawings and analysis take much part of the chapter.