Reinforced concrete prototypes for the factory in Italy (1950-1975). The architectural expressive machines

The relationship between architectural expressiveness and concrete formal structure was the leitmotif of the Italian structuralism in the second post-war two decades. The design of industrial structures radicalized this relationship because of the production processes nature that imposed to the architect the dimension of standardisation, repetition and economy of means. This approach reduced the distance between architectural form and informal building. This research aims to show how this condition transforms the idea of design process by some Italian authors, in the restricted field of reinforced-concrete structures for industry. The architectural Form becomes a process that faces with all the aspects of the project: the technological content (cooling, ventilation and water-drainage systems), the economic side, the engineering start up. In this way, the project of industrial structures is an outcome of the components design, constituted by structural elements (pillars, beams, desk boards), and controlled by the project of a structural bay, as a device of the design process. In this sense, the proposed paper would show the research on the Kodak factory in Marcianise by Aldo Favini and Gianluigi Ghò as a paradigm of this phenomenon. The paper illustrates how the hollow structural form of the elements addresses the problem of the technological content in the architectural design, showing morphological-structural models that isolates the bay as a design device. This aspect defines a specific quality of the industrial prototypes, developed through the professional partnership between the architect and the engineer. The knowledge about this kind of industrial prototypes is useful on one hand to admit these building as an Italian historical heritage that needs to be preserved, on the other hand to understand how it is possible transform these buildings through a new adaptive reuse.