Between 1928 and 1931  work started on the building of the house, but the work  that Riccardo Gualino had commissioned  from  the  Roman architects Busiri Vici was never completed,.

It was an original architectural style, the intellectual manifesto of a circle of artists who gathered around the Biella industrialist and his wife Cesarina Gulgo Salice; the style  showed in its rationalistic emphases the confessed ambition of "ignoring any transition with the past".

Gualino described it in this way in his memoirs: "two long wings of a one-storey building, enclosed by  two-storey octagonals (then they became heptagonals), like two arms with two fists, dominated in the centre and in the higher parts by the residence".

The two wings should have accommodated the rich art collection in a museum, and in the further parts of the building, the temporary exhibition rooms and the theatre.

Around the architectural complex,  which is located in the hills of Turin opposite the circle of the Alps, the park extends for an area of more than 100,000 square metres where a tennis court, a spacious swimming pool, numerous greenhouses, an orchard and vegetable garden and other facilities should have been situated.

 

The residential part of the complex would have had a courtyard laid out as a winter garden, directly in touch with the park through a gateway.

While on the  lower ground floor, linked to the theatre, the bathrooms were planned;  on the ground floor the representative sectors would have been organised - lounges, dining rooms, music rooms and library - linked together by a broad terrace opening onto the park.

The family apartments were planned for the first floor, linked to the ground floor by means of a large spiral ramp; these were to be connected to a gallery running the whole length of the courtyard; on the second floor were to be the guests' apartments and the rooms of the service staff. In 1931 Riccardo Gualino was under house imprisonment in Lipari accused of anti-fascism and for this reason the building was abandoned  (1),  until the Turin Federation of Combat Groups decided to use it as a heliotherapy health farm, entrusting the modification project  to the engineer  Luigi Ferroglio and to the architects Ferruccio Grassi and Mario Passanti.

The original building complex, greatly compromised by these modifications, was dismantled, not only from the architectural point of view but also in terms of the project: all the pavilions were used as care homes for the children on the health farm, or, as it was known in Turin, "The Third of January Colony".  This radical transformation led to a re-dimensioning of the windows, the raising of parts of the building, the closing of the terraces thereby making the implementation of the original project very difficult. In general you can see how,  following the various modifications,  the building lost the dramatic quality of the elevated parts and acquired a type of continuity, perhaps becoming less expressionist and more rationalistic (2). 

After the Second World War, the heliotherapy health farm came to an end and  the building complex became the base, until 1973, of the Don Gnocchi Foundation, founded to to look after war-orphaned and war-injured children.

Yet again the structure, in order to meet different requirements from its previous ones, had to adapt its services to new requirements and to eliminate, or rather reduce,  the architectural barriers.

After winning his battle on behalf of  war-injured  children Don Gnocchi undertook to help cerebrally damaged children; the building structure followed its  career as a care home until 1973 when this activity moved to nearby premises of the Gualino complex.

The Region became the new owner of the building complex following the dissolution of Opere Universitarie (University Works) which had acquired tthis cultural asset in 1974, using it as a university hall of residence.  In order to promote and encourage the development of advanced research  and training and to offer the Turin and Piedmont scientific community a space for initiatives it started a busy programme of restoration and re-  structurisation. 

In 1985 the "palazzino" or little palace was restored, or rather the higher part of the body of the building, with modern reception and congress services.  In October 1983 the Heads of the European Union Government elected Turin as the city in which to establish the European Foundation for Professional Training and they chose Villa Gualino as its headquarters.

The Foundation, whose mission consists of supporting reform processes  in the education and training field  of the partner countries of Central-Eastern Europe, of the new independent states including Mongolia,  became an important centre for the collection and dissemination of data. A network of national observers was  started In the partner countries with the task of disseminating useful information for the development of national policies in the training field, and of promoting international cooperation.

Scientists, researchers, and European Union workers live and work in the building complex, generating an internationally competitive campus. Since 2003 the offices, activities and laboratories of the  scientific institutes have been housed in the newly-constructed building, called Pavilion E, with a permanent base in the Villa.

 

The huge,  almost completely re-structured park,  offers the ideal conditions for study, work and short stays to all those  who work at the Villa and to all the  institutes'  and Conference Centre's guests.

 

The architectural complex of Villa Gualino is in the lower part of the Turin hills, in the midst of its huge park, a few hundred metres above the River Po, a short distance from Turin;   the large building affords a wide panoramic view of the city.

 

In the main body of the building (which consists of the residence and the galleries leading to the original museum of the Villa) there is a very distinctive Conference Centre with a main hall of 150 places, another one with 99 places as well as other smaller ones; there is a hotel with 52 rooms and catering facilities. Inside the complex the following institutes are also accommodated:  The European Training Foundation, the ISI Foundation, the Biotechnological Foundation, ASP (association for Piedmont's  scientific and technological development), the CSP (centre for excellence for research, development and experimentation in advanced information and computerised technologies), CIFS  - inter-university consortium for space physics,  and ICER - International Centre for Economic Research.

 

Entering from the main hall you arrive at the palazzina or small palace travelling along the poppy cypress walk.  The hotel guests enter from the main entrance. Here the gate is situated and it adapts well to the rationalistic architectural style of the small palace.  The large halls receive their light partly from the entrance hall and partly from the glass covering leading to the palace's internal courtyard.  The room is very simple, with pillars at regular intervals creating the veranda, furnished with settees in steel and Le Corbusier black leather, with very refined details.   The rooms have been re-structured qualitatively to the  level of a three-star hotel. The roof part is a useable terrace. The visitor to the conference room enters into the large hall and goes down a staircase into the large new body of the building at the level of the lower ground floor of the Villa. The new floor is separated from the small palace by means of a glass covered  strip and it has a ceiling which rises in steps towards the large uninterrupted glass panels. The lounge bar, the self-service restaurant, and the conference room are completely in glass on the west part and face onto a terrace from which you can enjoy the panorama of the city and of the Alps; the terrace dominates the big green lawn which is surrounded by smaller buildings. The stairs are situated in the corners of the huge new space  and under the strong corner angles of the reinforced cement roof. The lower corridor is entirely occupied by ETF, with the exception of a narrow  sleeve stretch against the main entrance, and of the conference centre which occupies the "left arm" but not the "fist". The long sleeves have been arranged with double sections.  The "fists" have a very compact design. The stairs are in the interior space, surrounded by a distribution corridor, and all around  there are offices in the form of a trapezium.  Above the stairs  there are two very distinctive heptagonal glass pyramids.

 

 

(1) Note:  in other sources Magnaghi, Monge, Re - the fall of the financial  empire of  Riccardo Gualino is  reported, which took place in 1929,  as the cause of the interruption of the work of the villa.  In those years the complex consisted of  the villa and the wings reserved to house exhibitions.

 

(2) Magnaghi, Monghe, Re, p. 114.

 

A. Magnaghe, M. Monghe, L. Re, Guide to the modern architecture of Turin, Designers Riuniti Editori. p 114 - 115.

M. Mimita Lambert, Riccardo Gualino: a collection and many projects, in Research in the History of Art, "Italy in the thirties, institutions, commission, research between modernity and tradition". The New Scientific Italy 1981.