Teatro Regio Torino
After the fire that destroyed the Teatro Regio in 1936, Carlo Mollino designed with absolutely modern criteria the new Teatro, that was inaugurated on 1973.
During the cold night between 8 and 9 February 1936, while Mulè’s Liolà was on the bill, a fire broke out in the subterranean area of the stage, where there were wooden beams and scaffolding crossed by myriads of electrical cables.
Only two years later, on 25 March 1965, the city administration promoted a new solution, entrusting the work to the engineer Marcello Zavelani Rossi and the architect Carlo Mollino, professor of architectural composition at the Politecnico of Torino and already the author of the Rai Auditorium and the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Crafts building. The work got underway at the beginning of September 1967.
An artist like Mollino could not even think of working in an exclusively conservative sense or in any case be bound to strictly philological aesthetic and architectural canons. His extraordinary personality thus led him to give vent to his imagination by suggesting the old Baroque progenitor through a use of curved lines and sinuosity, an idea as original as it was inspired.
Sketch of the Regio hall made by Carlo MollinoThe stylistic constant that more than any other characterizes the external and internal feature of each part of the new Teatro Regio – of which Mollino designed every little detail, from the doorknobs to the lights, from the stairways to the structures in reinforced concrete – is precisely the curved line.
The exterior of the Teatro is characterised by the use of materials that integrate very well with the surrounding edifices. In addition to the brick, the rusticated concrete and the Luserna stone that also covers part of the fly tower, two large windows lighten the external “flanks”, making it possible from the foyers to enjoy the view of Juvarra’s elegant façade of the State Archive (situated in today’s Piazzetta Mollino) and creating a suggestive exchange of vistas between the interior and exterior.
