“The Building of One Hundred Windows”: Bari and its RAI Headquarters

Fall 2019 Berlage Space, TV & Architecture

“The Building of One Hundred Windows”: Bari and its RAI Headquarters — Francesca Giudetti

II. The National Television pioneering and the birth of the RAI

TU Delft University, Fall 2019 Proseminar Space, Television and Architecture Supervisor: Léa-Catherine Szacka

THE BUILDING OF ONE HUNDRED WINDOWS: BARI AND ITS RAI HEADQUARTERS Francesca Giudetti

The average Italian family always has a guest at dinner, and perhaps doesn’t know it.

A guest who does not eat, it is true, and who costs twelve thousand lire a year. A guest who is not made of ‘flesh and blood’, but which also dominates the tables. He has an ancestor in Don Giovanni, an illustrious and terrible ancestor: the pious Christian, unable to take food, but capable, in his silence, to kill. The evening party of every Italian family, instead of stone, is made of valves, wood and glass, and is the television.

As soon as the family goes to the table, it also sits down, does not eat but speaks and sings: it does not kill, of course, but it can do worse. It can stuff heads, form opinions, induce consumption.

LUCIANO BIANCIARDI, Invited to dine, in «abc», 11th February 1968.

The essay aims to trace the history of RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) debuts and its first architectural headquarters in the peninsula. The outline in what follows develops by means of analyzing the temporal and architectural evolution of four different RAI Headquarters, such as Turin (1924; historical headquarter in 19-21, Via Arsenale), Milan (1954; historical headquarter in 27, Corso Sempione), Rome (1957; historical headquarter in 66, Via Teulada) and Bari (1959).

I. Introduction Television has, in fact, not only shaped life, routine and habits of Italians, forming them as «citizens and men»1, but at the very beginning it has contributed to accentuate the existing gap between the North and the South. Hence, the major and first spaces of production and consumption of the Italian Television were mainly located in the north.

1 Pugliese, S. Un mestiere difficile, in Dieci anni di televisione in Italia (Roma: ERI, 1964), pp. 71-2.

In the wake of the researches carried out in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, in the 1930s in Italy pioneering experiments regarding remote image transmissions started to intensify.

The EIAR, the sole licensee of radio programs, based in Turin, and the two leading companies, SAFAR and Magneti Marelli, based in Milan and Turin were the «cradles of the Italian Television»2 and highly monitored by the Fascist 2Government. Between 1940 and 1945, the broadcasts were suspended under the war bombardments and all the documents and archives destroyed3.

In 1952 RAI was born, with the aim of restarting television experimentations. Public broadcasts officially resume on January 3, 1954 with the inauguration of the National Program (Appendix, fig. 1); much of the peninsula is served– in an area that comprises twenty millions of inhabitants–and in the next three years almost every region will have access to the service. Nevertheless, «the social stratification present in the Italy of the 1950s suggests to us how large portions of the country seemed to move in a completely autonomous way with respect to the general tendencies, by virtue of a series of dynamics related to the geographical origin, the economic position or the membership of class of every single social group»4. In fact, the 1951 4Census lays bare the backwardness of the country: 59% of Italians finished primary school, while 13 million still didn’t have a degree and of these 5 and a half million, over a tenth of the population, were illiterate. 1% had a degree, 3.3% had a higher education qualification and only 5.9% have reached the junior high school license. Due to this, in 1955 RAI launched the program “Telescuola” (TV-School) and other school programs to educate all the population. Subsequently, in 1958 it was launched a three-years course dedicated to people who did not have elementary education. Compared to the British Open University (OU), established in 1969 in the original television studios at Alexandra Palace, the Italian experiment was quite a different concept.

2 Piazzoni I., Storia delle televisioni in Italia. Dagli esordi alle web tv (Roma: Carocci Editore, 2014), p.

19.

3 Verdegiglio D., La Tv di Mussolini. Sperimentazioni televisive nel ventennio fascista (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2003), p. 322.

4 Garofalo D., Storia sociale della televisione in Italia 1954-1969 (Venezia: Marsilio, 2018), p. 23.

The Italian Television Studio turned into a real classroom, with teachers and students selected by the Ministry of Education. 32.523 were the enrolled people in the first year, while almost 100.000 were two years later. The cultural divulgation represented an important part of the RAI’s show schedule over the first ten years of broadcasting. Under the progress, between 1957 and 1960, «the growth rate of subscriptions is very fast: 306.000 in 1956, 595.000 in 1957, more than a million in 1958 (…) Italy is in a leading position on the European scene, exceeding the indexes of countries such as UK and France, where TV had debuted before»5.

III. The first RAI Headquarters: Turin, Milan and Rome Being said that, the first RAI Headquarters in Turin was in a listed building, example of the eclectic tastes of the nineteenth century, built on a project by the architect Luigi Beria in 1895 with ceramic medallions representing Volta, Pacinotti, Siemens, Ferraris, work by Christopher Vicary of Zurich and graffiti by Zola6. Very few photos and videos show the building, that used to have a domestic character (Appendix, figg. 2-3). This building is no longer open to the public though. On the contrary, Milan historical headquarters is situated on the lefthand side coming from the Arch of Peace and was designed in 1939 by the famous architects Gio Ponti and Nino Bertolaia. Ponti’s original idea envisioned a complex of three separate buildings (the offices, the broadcasts and the theatre), in order to be easily recognizable (Appendix, fig. 4). The radio, for which the production center had been designed, made way for television production, which required much larger spaces for the studios, the required staff, and the broadcasting technology it employed. At a later stage, the project has been altered; between the offices and the broadcasts, the transparent building of vertical communications7. Architectural details like the portico and the portals on the road are linked to the architect’s discourse on proportions.

5 Piazzoni I., op. cit., p. 47.

6 Polytechnic of Turin. City House Department, “Cultural and Environmental Heritage in the Municipality of Turin”, Society of Engineers and Architects in Turin, vol. 1, Turin, 1984, p. 319.

7 Some descriptions are contained in Celant, Germano. Espressioni di Gio Ponti (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2011).

Gio Ponti was also responsible of the design of the interior, partially conserved today (Appendix, figg. 5-6). This architectural complex opens twice a year to the public, on the occasion of the “Spring Days” organized by FAI (Italian Environment Fund).

On 19 December 1957, the Rai center for Rai production, designed by the architect Francesco Berarducci, was inaugurated in via Teulada 66 in Rome (Appendix, figg. 7-8). This one was the first center designed and built specifically for television production, and played a central role in the development of television in Italy. Here, for example, there was the famous Studio 1, where the homonymous variety program was produced in the 1960s. «In addition to hosting some important entertainment broadcasts, this is the main technical and organizational node of the transmission and broadcast network of audio and video signals, managed by the sister company Rai Way»8.

The RAI Centre is composed of two buildings, respectively the offices and the services building, connected by a glass bridge. The CPTV had 12 equipped studios, both for entertainment and for the newscast; about 3000 people worked there every day in 13,870 square meters, of which 6,945 covered, including renowned actors, journalists, technicians, employed workers (Appendix, fig. 9).

Furthermore, there were stationary buses, heavy mobile studies, to carry out external filming. Furthermore, the structure of the Rome CPTV was built, so that if there were any energy problems in Italy, it could be completely autonomous. Still nowadays, even with the technological progress, the complex is operative and functional.

Over the first ten years of the RAI development, Italy underwent a profound social revolution. «(…) there was a mass exodus from the rural areas towards the cities, and from the South towards the North. The statistics are notoriously unreliable, but we can say that between 1952 and 1962 more than fifteen and a half million Italians changed their place of residence. In the five years of the ‘Economic Miracle’, 1958-63, more than 1,300,000 persons moved from the South to other regions of Italy. Puglia, Sicily and Campania were the southern regions which suffered the greatest hemorrhages of population. Migratory trends halted briefly in the mid 1960s, but then resumed in the period 1967-72 with almost as much intensity as in the late 1950s and early 1960s»10.

V. Bari and the boom of the 1950s

Paul Ginsborg in his essay regarding “Family, Culture and Politics in Contemporary Italy” speculates about the geography of Italy, that is to say, the three Italies (Bagnasco, 1977) and how the South was totally disconnected from the rest, especially from the Industrial Triangle (Appendix, fig. 10). «Outside of the few major cities, it was a country of unchanged patterns of peasant life, of great and enduring poverty, especially in the South, of provincial cultures and local dialects»9.

The South was, therefore, predominantly rural, with poor land and cities. Bari, Apulia’s capital, was no exception. At the beginning of the 1950s, right after the World War II, the Apulian city, in a poor and bad condition, started to rise up and take flight with the boom of the 50s. The city and the South-East coast in particular, were subjected to many alterations. «These will be the years animated by the debate on the new masterplan, then drawn up in 1952 by the architects Marcello Piacentini and Alberto and Giorgio Calza-Bini and approved in 1954. The new urban planning instrument was immediately characterized as incomplete and flexible, it is undeniable that it will definitely affect the future design of the city»11.

The famous urbanist Luigi Piccinato described Bari in this way: «in agony and destined to remain choked by its own rhythm of indiscriminate and irrational expansion»12. In the context above mentioned, after the headquarters of Turin, Milan and Rome, Bari had the honor to be the fourth to have a proper RAI Production Centre. Concerning its location, it rises between via Egnazia and via Dalmazia, in an elegant and modern neighborhood, which expands visibly on the eastern part of the city and along the promenade that leads on the way to Brindisi. The same neighborhood will be later on characterized by a new organization, due to the general masterplan (P.R.G.), presented by the Roman architect L. Quaroni in 1968.

8 Lari A., Il centro produzione Tv di Roma. Via Teulada 66. La cittadella della televisione (Bergamo: Sandit Libri, 82016), p. 6.

9 Baranski G. Z. and Lumley R., Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), p. 24.

10 ivi, pp. 32-33.

11 Spinelli D., “La costa a sud-est di Bari”, in Il lungomare a Sud di Bari. Gli studi (Bari: Mario Adda Editore, 2018), p. 31.

12 op. cit., p. 35.

IV. The South of Italy within the national discourse

«Quaroni proposes to the city a general variant of the authentically innovative Piacentini and Calza-Bini plan ‘in the method of work, in the current urban planning solutions, in the articulated normative still largely experimental’. The plan focused on the most debated issues, from the integration between the different parts of the city, the role of the infrastructure network, polycentrism, until the railway is relocated. With the displacement of the railway, and with the organization of the second and third median consequently the arrangement of the coast would have been realized»13.

Until 1955, Italy and its Government took care of guaranteeing an optimal service in the Northern part of the peninsula, leaving the South isolated.

«In February 1955 a very long article on the Radiocorriere signed by the Minister of postal and telecommunications Gennaro Cassiani titled ‘TV and FM throughout Italy’, with well twelve years in advance on the pre-established Italy will be able to count on flood in 1956 coverage of television broadcasts and radio frequency modulation in the peninsula and in the islands»14. Hence, the 14television service was extended to central and southern Italy, to Sicily and to Sardinia. Repeater after repeater, television conquered ever wider edges of the national territory. The radio link from Milan to Palermo, starting from the metal tower of 100 meters high, in corso Sempione, took place from center to center through the whole peninsula in twenty successive sections, touching Puglia and Calabria, and reaching Palermo after one per course total of 1630 kilometers. They were built in less than eighteen months twenty-four new masonry buildings for total 82,000 square meters in addition to adaptations of existing premises and cabins prefabricated structures for repeaters.

The years of birth and consolidation television technology in Italy coincide, perhaps not surprisingly, with the years of so-called economic miracle.

«Years in which slowly and not without distortions yes passed from the aspiration ‘food-hygiene-home’ to that ‘home-refrigerator-TV-car’15 entering the consumer society.»16

13 ibidem 14 Tv ed FM in tutta Italia, “Radiocorriere” n. 7, 1955, p.3.

15 Crainz G., Storia del miracolo italiano (Roma: Donzelli, 2003), pp. 99-100, 132-133, 143.

16 Boccazzi Varotto C., “Costruire la RAI. Tecnologia e televisione in Italia dai pionieri al boom economico”, Nuova Civiltà delle Macchine. Elettronica e Telecomunicazioni, December 3, 2004, N°2, Year XXII.

VI. Bari’s RAI Headquarter The RAI Headquarter, inaugurated in Bari on 11 March 1959, marks a new era, “the beginning of a new adventure and of a new raison d’être”– as the scholar Delio De Martino said. For three days Bari was the center of events, exhibitions, special programs and visits by national envoys of the major newspapers. In those days the Radiocorriere correspondent wrote on a four-page special: ‘The Rai di Bari headquarters is housed in a very modern building, equipped with the best installations. These include a 500 cubic meter auditorium, two smaller auditoriums and three r cording rooms. A TV repeater and three MF repeaters are also installed in the building. The building was built in record time considering the grandeur and complexity of the facilities. And it would be one of the manybeautiful buildings that are born a little everywhere in Bari if to distinguish it from all the others there was not on the top a mighty articulated antenna. A harmonious structure, a kind of unmistakable mark, of special mark, so that anyone who sees it from afar, above the roofs, above the attics with hanging gardens, cannot immediately recognize the white terraces the headquarters of Rai. And it rises in the heart of the modern city and therefore, active, in perennial movement, projected forward into a fervor of initiatives to be the envy of Milan (which in fact culminates and takes shape every year with the great exhibition of the Fiera del Levante)17.

The building plant is Rationalist and acquired the nickname of “Palace with a Hundred Windows”, because the façade consisted mainly of glass and aluminum (Appendix, figg. 11-24). Interesting and fascinating aspect is the fact that the architect was a woman for the first time: Elena Guaccero (1924-2006), a multifaceted figure from Bari, graduated in Rome and student and friend of the aforementioned L. Quaroni. She then moved to Austria and Germany, gaining a personal artistic research. “The fundamental criterion is the perfect adherence of the building to its function”, stated Guaccero about her architectural approach in the Bari headquarter. The building has seven floors that have changed their functions over time18.

17 Documents contained at RAI Press Office, Archives. (https://www.rai.it/ufficiostampa/sedi/Bari-35ecf488-0976-4fcdad61-252f9d86bafe.html).

18 An article published on the regional newspaper “La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno” on September 1958 contains details about the functional programming of the building (http://elenacattaneo.it/2017/12/elena-guaccero-architetto/).

The basement contained the technical services such as electric cabin, auxiliary power generators, frequency and voltage stabilization, battery room, thermal plant, cooling systems, warehouses for heavy materials. The first floor hosted the entrance hall, the information service, a postal agency and offices for subscribers. In the four floors above, instead, there were the main levers of command: direction, propaganda and development, technical offices and programs, radio newspaper. Going up, general services, telephone exchanges, laboratories and an auditorium of 500 cubic meters per half thousand spectators.

Moreover, the sixth floor consisted of control rooms, frames, various equipments and instruments and the attic reserved for further and future expansions. Furthermore, the building is surmounted by a large metal tower that carries the transmitting antennas of a TV repeater and three Mf repeaters installed in a special room below as well as the various receiving antennas for TV and radio connections with nearby transmitting centers. The dense score of the pillars allows flexibility in terms of internal distribution.

Still nowadays this building performs with dignity the function for which it arose 60 years ago and constitutes a symbol of Modernity in the Apulian city. Despite the delay (if compared to the other Italian television spaces of production), Bari RAI building has been important from the beginning to build a regional identity19.

Many are the architectural aspects in common with the Milan and Rome headquarters: the transparency, also due to propaganda purposes, the vertical connection blocks, the number of floors, the congruency of the building towards the function, the style (Rationalist) and the position of the antenna. If, as described in the Radiocorriere TV in 1954, «(…) in the sky of Rome the TV antenna of Monte Mario soars not far from Michelangelo’s dome, two eras, two worlds, one civilization», in the sky of Bari the new antenna has symbolized and still does the epiphany of «regional myths»20 and the willingness to make the region and its culture known.

19 Parallelisms could be traced with Granada Television, unique case for its importance for regional identity and geographical narrative (cfr. Cooke L., A Sense of Place: Regional British Television Drama, 1956-82 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).

20 De Martino D., “Miti in via Dalmazia”, in Puglia Mitica (Bari: Levante Editore, 2012), p. 1235.

APPENDIX

Arsenale, access to the interior

g. 4

g. 5

Turin RAI Headquarter, 19-21 Via Arsenale.

QSL card from the RAI on 5 June 1954 on 9.570 MHz.

fig. 4 Turin RAI Headquarter, 19-21 Via Arsenale, access to the interior.

fig. 3

Gio Ponti, Milan RAI Headquarter, 27 Corso Sempione, interiors.

fig. 7

fig. 6

fig. 5

Turin RAI Headquarter, 19-21 Via Arsenale, access to the interior.

Gio Ponti, Milan RAI Headquarter, 27 Corso Sempione, stairs detail.

Gio Ponti, Milan RAI Headquarter, 27 orso Sempione, interiors.

fig. 4

Gio Ponti, Milan RAI Headquarter, 27

Francesco Berarducci, Rome RAI Headquarter, 66 Via Corso Sempione.

Teulada.

Gio Ponti, Milan RAI Headquarter, 27 Corso Sempione.

fig. 4

Gio Ponti, Milan RAI Headqua Corso Sempione.

fig. 8

fig. 3

fig. 2

fig. 1

Gio Ponti, Milan RAI Headquarter, 27 orso Sempione.

Francesco Berarducci, Rome RAI Headquarter, 66 Via Teulada, original model.

Rome RAI Headquarter, 66 Via Teulada, revisited plan.

fig. 10

Italy map divisions.

fig. 9

Rome RAI Headquarter, 66 Via Teulada, revisited plan.

fig. 12

fig. 11

fig. 9

fig. 10

Rome RAI Headquarter, 66 Via Teulada, revisited plan.

Italy: map divisions.

fig. 11

fig. 15 Elena Guaccero, Bari RAI Headquarter, drawing.

Bari RAI Headquarter, entrance (1959).

Elena Guaccero and other people, Bari RAI Headquarter, construction site.

Elena Guaccero, Bari RAI Headquarter, drawing. fig. 10

Bari RAI Headquarter, side elevation (2019).

fig. 15

fig. 16

Italy map divisions.

Bari RAI Headquarter, construction site (1958).

fig. 15

fig. 10

fig. 14

fig. 13

Italy map divisions.

Bari RAI Headquarter, entrance (1959).

Bari RAI Headquarter, entrance (1959).

fig. 16

Bari RAI Headquarter, interior (1959).

Bari RAI Headquarter, interior (1959).

fig. 17

fig. 19

fig. 18

Bari RAI Headquarter, recording room (2018).

fig. 20 Bari RAI Headquarter, view from the canteen (2018). fig. 20

Bari RAI Headquarter, antennas (1958). fig. 18

Bari RAI Headquarter, night view (1959).

Bari RAI Headquarter, antennas (1958).

Bari RAI Headquarter, antennas (1958).

fig. 24

fig. 22

fig. 21

Bari RAI Headquarter, backside (1959).

fig. 20

fig. 19 Bari RAI Headquarter, view from the street (1960).

Bari RAI Headquarter, view from the street (1960).

Bari night view view (1959).

(1959).

BariRAI RAIHeadquarter, Headquarter, night

fig. 23

fig. 17Bari RAI Headquarter, backside (1959).

Bari RAI Headquarter, facade detail (2019).

Bari RAI Headquarter, view from the street (1960).

fig. 19

fig. 18

fig. 17

Bari RAI Headquarter, backside (1959).

Bari RAI Headquarter, stairs detail (2018).

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