Designed by Eng. Enrico Mandolesi in 1964, and inaugurated six years later, this building occupies one of the lots of the facility prepared in 1944, for the Faculty of Engineering pavilions. The intent that, at every scale, guides structural and compositional choices is flexibility, considered by the author to be “one of the most significant aims of the design intent.” Understood in this framework is the use of a load-bearing framework structure, the only one capable of realizing large overhangs and freeing the internal distribution from the encumbrance of load-bearing elements; the adoption of a construction site based on prefabrication procedures on footings, which allowed rapid and modular production; and the use of concrete, a ductile material par excellence. The latter, left in its raw state so as to denounce its full structural entity, gives shape to the pillars, floors, facade panels and wide cornice, which opening upward evokes the horizontal momentum of the Japanese pagoda. A roughness of finish, a “brutalism,” that Mandolesi learns from the works of Kenzo Tange, a proponent of “honesty to materials” and dryness of language. Moreover, the compositional layout echoes Le Corbusier’s principles: the pilotis and the roof garden; the horizontal window, which here coincides with the slot between the infill elements and the floors, made in progressive overhang; the free façade, stretched between the horizons; the free plan, entrusted to partitions conceived as interchangeable functional modules. The basement floor accommodates laboratories and a large meeting room; the two elevated floors, are articulated internally in three bands: those at the ends, built cantilevered, are dedicated to offices; while in the inner band, the service-escalator blocks form the heads of a sequence of spaces, intended for research and interspersed with cloisters. In 1969 this building won the Inarch Prize.
