 The original project
Between 1928 and 1931 work for the construction of the House, which Riccardo Gualino had commissioned from the Roman architects Busiri Vici, was started, but never finished.
It was original architecture, the intellectual manifesto of a circle of artists who gathered around the Biella industrialist Cesarina Gulgo and his wife Salice, which showed in its rationalistic accents, the confessed ambition of " ignoring any transition with the past".
Gualino was thus described in memoirs "two long constructed wings on one floor, closed by octagonals (which then became seven-sided), like two arms with two fists, dominating the centre and the higher part of the house".
 The two wings should have housed the rich art collections in a museum and, in the extreme parts, temporary exhibition rooms and the theatre which, linked to the museum and the terraces, had a seat capacity of 200 and which should have constituted an avant-garde studio centre for dramatic art and opera music.
Around the architectural complex, situated in the Turin hills, opposite the circle of the Alps, extended the park with an area over 100.000 square metres, in which a tennis court, a broad swimming pool, numerous greenhouses, the vegetable plot, the orchard, and conveniences should have been built.
The dwelling house should have had a winter garden courtyard, in direct contact with the park, through a portico with pillars in a five-sided formation, almost a continuation of the surrounding woods.
 Whilst in the basement were planned the conveniences linked to the theatre, on the ground floor the representative environments would have been organised – lounges, dining rooms, music rooms, library – linked by a vast terrace open onto the park.
On the first floor the family apartments were planned, in touch with the ground floor through a single huge helix-shaped ramp, linked by a gallery along the whole courtyard, and on the second floor the guests' apartments and the service staff's rooms.
Information from "L'Architettura Italiana", (Italian Architecture), May 1935
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