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"The Palace of Labour designed and built
by Nervi and his son Antonio for the Turin exhibition of 1961 was the
result of a competition held in 1959. The building—containing 85,000
square feet of exhibition space—had to be capable of conversion to a
technical school at the end of the exhibition. It was erected in less than
eighteen months.
Like Mies van der Rohe's buildings, there
is a subtle fusion of structure and space in Nervi's buildings. But
whereas Mies searched for free internal space, Nervi's aesthetic is
dependent on an energetic exhibition of the structural parts of a
building. The Palace of Labour was no exception... the simple 525 feet
square shape was divided into sixteen structurally separate steel roofed
compartments each supported on 65-foot-high concrete stems. The external
walls, entirely clad in glass, wrapped round the perimeter of the building
and incorporated large 70-foot-high vertical mullions."
—Dennis Sharp. Twentieth
Century Architecture: a Visual History. p245.
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