Gio Ponti, demiurge, Director. International Labour Exhibition, Turin 1961

Between May and October 1961, Turin celebrat- ed the centenary of the Unification of Italy. The Piedmontese capital, the first capital of united Italy, had already been the venue in 1911 for the first fiftieth anniversary. In 1961, in Italy, at the height of its economic rebirth, the construction of a significant complex of exhibition pavilions in a large outdoor area along the river Po, originally intended as a park, was planned for the second celebratory event in what had in the meantime become the country’s industrial capital, Turin. Among these constructions, the Palazzo del La- voro, built in less than a year to a design by en- gineer Pierluigi Nervi, stands out for its gigantic and unusual transparent volume. Inside was to be a vast, highly articulated exhibition dedicated to the theme of Work: an absolute value that the constituent fathers of the Italian Republic in 1947 had placed as the foundation of the Constitution, dedicating the first article to it. The architect, Gio Ponti, was entrusted with this exhibition’s direc- tion and general layout. Within his project, he coordinated the contributions of dozens of other important architects, artists, and graphic design- ers, each working on a specific exhibition space. The exhibition ‘Man at work - 100 years of tech- nical and social development: achievements and prospects’ is thus set up on almost forty thousand square metres. Twenty-one foreign states and international organisations, thirteen major com- panies, associations, and Italian institutions, and ninety-two architects, painters, graphic design- ers, sculptors, and decorators1 contributed to the exhibition. In the compassionate and industrious city of Turin, which just that year quickly reached one million inhabitants compared to the three hundred thousand of 1911, the ITALIA 61 event was to be attended by around six million paying visitors. It attracted leading international person- alities, from Queen Elizabeth to Sophia Loren and Walt Disney to Le Corbusier.