RAI AUDITORIUM VIA VERDI - TURIN

Year 1986
Client: RAI RADIOTELEVIOSIONE ITALIANA
AUDITORIUM RAI
 
Extract from the program of the Inaugural concert, 9 October 1986:
The attentive critic will want to excuse if, entering the newly structured Auditorium with the searching eye of those who want to discover the signs of the work just finished, they will find some unfinished details, some smudges in the furniture details: We will apologize by stating with a touch of pride that in just four months, from the evening of the last concert on June 2 to today, we have dismantled the entire stage, the armchairs of the stalls and balconies, the floors, the wooden structures of the balconies, wall coverings, false ceilings, all electrical and air conditioning systems to reconstruct them in compliance with the many obligations dictated by the new laws on safety and to return the Auditorium to the great RAI symphonic complex of Turin and its public, ready for the new musical season 86-87.
Our goal will then be completely achieved if the attentive critic fails to identify from the comparison between the memory and the present those modest variations that the current regulations have imposed to carry out: it will be the clear sign that what we had set ourselves at the beginning of the year, to begin the project of intervention required, and precisely to restore in detail, even if with different materials and with some altimetric variations, the architecture of Mollino, will have been achieved.

Certainly there are news: new are the mobile television stations, arranged halfway between the stalls and the balcony so as not to interfere with the view of the public, indispensable for the television recording of the concerts according to the most advanced techniques: they were deliberately made with mobility criteria both to make television shooting possible from multiple points of view and above all to underline the instrumental and therefore non-fixed nature of the workstation itself.
New is the arrangement of the spaces of the stage redesigned according to a geometric distribution more adherent to the original one conceived by Mollino; also the lowering of the level of the stage considering the stalls was carried out in that spirit of continuity between the stalls and the orchestra steps, already pursued in the initial project, which is a remarkable visual and spatial achievement: the very extension of the stage beyond the wings of the proscenium, motivated by television needs, accentuates that sense of continuity to which the new arrangement of the seats in the stalls is not extraneous, defined in the most rigorous respect of the regulations in force and developed according to concentric circular generators having for fulcrum a central point of the stage with the lateral offshoots enveloping the perimeter.

Pursuing the initial objective already mentioned, some of the additions made in past years have been eliminated: such as the control room arranged on the second balcony, now unused for some time, which interrupted the enveloping continuity of the back wall of the room created in the original project; as well as the rigid steel structures recently placed on the sides of the proscenium to support the reflectors, replaced by two cantilevered pylons anchored to vertical guides to obtain a variable displacement of the stage lights.
Finally, new, even if not visible to the public, is the sophisticated systems, an indispensable equipment for a modern Auditorium, created with advanced criteria and adequate, in addition to the functionality of the hall, to the possibility of sound recording and television recording of concerts.