Mollino 1954 reloaded

The paper presents the results of an experimental design research project promoted and developed by Politecnico di Torino with the town of Gressoney Saint Jean. The experimental Casa Capriata designed by prominent 20th century Italian architect Carlo Mollino was never completed. Fifty years later, proposal were submitted to complete the project as an exemple of a technologically innovative and prefabricated building. It will be opened as an Alpine refuge dedicated to the great architect during the autumn of 2012. The building has been transformed into an experimental building of which the architectural, structural and technological aspects have been remodeled in line with the design criteria specified by Carlo Mollino. The aerial architecture of the Casa Capriata designed for the 10th Triennale of Milan (1954) is entirely separated from the ground level and its planning was influenced by Carlo Mollino’s aerodynamic studies on Alpine buildings, carried out in the same years. The concept of the tree-house, reversing the archetypal of a vertical sequence of masses and weights, paradoxically by means of a naturalistic metaphor, showing then the weakness and conventionality of the archetypal itself, is the basis of many projects of Mollino. In the earlier versions, Casa Capriata appears as a building rationally inserted into the mountain landscape, with its timber structure and the roof inclined to prevent the snow load, a project inspired by the "walser" house typology. Yet, the nature of its relation with the ground is completely perverted by the presence of a free-form structural member, a kind of unspecified tripod, maybe conceived as made of concrete, a true supporting "machine", a connection device between the building and the irregular rock mountainside. Such element will be substituted, in the final version of the project, by a simpler counterbraced timber structure, but it is the concept of the support intended as a mechanical device, as a technological mediation between the ground and the building that rules the project. The continuity present in the traditional "walser" house basements is definitely distorted. When the continuity is broken, all the structural body must be reinterpreted: when the supporting points are reduced to three, the structural behaviour turns from plane to three-dimensional, by means of the bracing system in the roof: a part of the structure become suspended. The static equilibrium of the structural members is no longer defined implicitly, following a typological way of thinking, where each element has its own structural role as supported or supporting, on the basis of its position and of its shape; the behaviour of each structural member is now set by the architect, inside the structural body. The project becomes a site where the technological experimentation can take place, on timber construction, on joints, on the way of building, yielding to new structural and constructional solutions. The equilibrium is then the central concept in the structural project: when the reference to typology is abandoned and the behaviour of the building must be redesigned out of the classical schemes, then the static equilibrium of the timber structural components becomes the guiding line of the project, at the same time limit and potentiality of the structural thought, bringing back the architect to the same considerations that inspired ancient builders, when design solutions were not resting merely on typology but they still reflected their original energy.