We had another day of architectural touring in Turin, starting with a BBPR office block in the northern suburbs, designed by Ernesto Rogers in 1959 as a manifesto against modernism:-
From here, we drove to Aldo Rossi’s only work in Turin, much less visually interesting than his manifestoes on urbanism might lead one to expect:-
We parked by the Galleria San Federico, which, rather amazingly, is a building of the 1930s, designed to house the offices of La Stampa:-
Through to the Piazza S. Carlo, a fine piece of seventeenth-century urban design, first planned in 1620, work beginning in 1637:-
We stopped to admire Juvarra’s façade of S. Cristina at the south end, with its fine baroque statuary:-
And Juvarra’s nearby church of S. Filippo Neri with it’s ninetennth-century façade constructed to Juvarra’s design:-
The object of the day’s journey was the Egyptian Museum, but I had forgotten how much its early privatisation (it was privatised in 2004) had led to an infinitely much more professional and well-lit set of museum displays (and vastly much more popular), but a simultaneous loss of the original, extraordinarily well-preserved, nineteenth-century sense of imaginative discovery (till recently, it was pretty much as it was originally laid out in the Palace of the Accademia delle Scienze in 1824).
I took photographs of two sad cat mummies:-











have you already said and I missed it – Ernesto Rogers is connected to Richard???;Turin such a fascinating mix of baroque and modern and outstanding 1930s even if pollitically that period is so distressing….
Yes, cousin of his father. Turin must have been very interesting in the fifties. Charles