Restoration Auditorium RAI

This project dealt with a “total work of art” by a great architect of the past and created a space adapted to the new culture of listening and music. The project entailed the conversion of the auditorium designed by Carlo Mollino in 1950. Its organization and functionality were no longer compatible with contemporary needs and the growing ambitions of the National Orchestra of the RAI (Italian Broadcasting Corporation), created by unifying the different RAI orchestras, which were suppressed. Since its inauguration in 1953, the dimensions of the
orchestra had grown enormously and the technologies and spaces dedicated to music had changed completely.
The problems raised by the original concert hall were numerous: the inadequate acoustics and the non-uniform distribution of the sound; poor visibility of the stage from the balcony and gallery, the seating for the audience insufficient in comparison with the potential of the audience in the auditorium, the dimensions of the stage insufficient to contain an orchestra of 120 musicians and a chorus of 150 singers, the need to improve the layout of the spaces reserved to the public and those for staff, the necessity to adapt the building to current fire regulations, and not least to remove extensive and important parts of the ceilings, which were made of an asbestos mixture The RAI commissioned a preliminary study for acoustic alterations from Artec in New York, the most important American company in the design of spaces for music. It then applied to Müller BBM of Munich, Europe’s leading company in musical acoustic design, which recommended the creation a single flat ceiling and concave walls. On the basis of these guidelines the RAI announced a competition of ideas which received various entries with suggestions such as the radical transformations of the auditorium and the complete cancellation of the original architecture. None of these ideas was implemented, as they entailed costs that were excessive. It was instead decided to make the smallest necessary investment to obtain an adequate functional adaptation and so allow for the return of the RAI National Orchestra. The assignment was commissioned from one of the groups participating in the competition, Mario Valle Engineering, which drew on the collaboration of the architects Zanuso and Camerana and envisaged the acoustic design by Müller BBM.
The intervention had to deal with the unified character of an auditorium in which each detail participated in the construction of an idea, an organic system in which it was difficult to add, remove or alter anything. The project was preceded by a historical and critical study by Benedetto Camerana, who investigated the transformation into an auditorium of a building originally structured as a circus, hence a space in which the audio-visual relationship was very different from that of a concert hall. Mollino, winner of the competition announced by the RAI in 1950, sought to reorganize the room of the former Riding School, already transformed into a theatre in the early twentieth century, in particular by trying to enlarge the bottleneck of the tight proscenium arch; but substantially he was unable to avoid a space still divided into two distinct volumes, one occupied by the public, the other by the orchestra.
The conversion started from these necessities, hence with the substitution of the parts removed from Mollino’s project with a neutral architecture, a passive vocabulary which sought to add nothing to the idealist vision of the architect. The new arrangement remedied the acoustic deficiencies, improved the visibility, increased the seating and updated the plant. The intervention confirmed the elimination of the double volume, with the entire removal of the architrave and the hollow pillars of the proscenium arch and the profiles in asbestos, namely the dome of the auditorium and the shell of the platform. The wooden roof of the concert hall was replaced with a steel structure.
For the ceiling in reflecting plaster the project proposed a sunburst pattern, on the instructions of the Fine Arts Supterintendent, which would evoke the idea of the original circus. The terminal sections of the balconies were also demolished: before concave and converging on the auditorium, now they have been rebuilt with a convex course and face towards the orchestra. The stage was set back, enlarging its dimensions. The walls of the auditorium and the stage were rebuilt with convex elements in reflecting plaster and acoustic panels were suspended above the orchestra.

credit

Progetto:Benedetto Camerana (project and historic-analysis)
with Michele Pisano, Marco Zanuso, Mario Valle Engineering s.p.a. (general contractor)
Location: Torino, via Rossini 15
Realization: Finished
Client: RAI – Radio Televisione Italiana
Procedure: Competition, assignment
Functions: Auditorium general restoring
Chronology: Competition on invitation (1998), assignment, definitive and executive project (July 2000)
Collaborators: Cristina Franco
Building cost: 31.000.000,00 €