The expressiveness of constructive logic. Two italian ways to conceive the ribbed slab

The relationship between architectural expressiveness and formal structure was the leitmotif of the Italian structuralism in the second post-war two decades. The design of industrial structures radicalizes this relationship because of the production processes nature that imposed to the architect the dimension of standardisation, repetition and economy of means. This paper would show, in the field of reinforced concrete single-storey factories, how two of the most important Italian engineers of this period, as Pierluigi Nervi and Aldo Favini face with the structural type of the ribbed slab, in order to preserve an idea of authorial design. In this sense, the paper proposed a comparison between the Pierluigi Nervi’s Gatti’s woolen mill and the Angelo Mangiarotti’s and Aldo Favini’s Splugen Brau warehouse. The key to interpretation tries to understand on the one hand the structural form-finding process, on the other hand the structural-spatial meaning in the architectural design of the buildings proposed.