Top of the World
The Melara quadrilateral was designed by a large group of professionals from Trieste (29 in number) selected by the Order of Architects and Engineers, coordinated by Carlo Celli of the Celli studio in Trieste and built between 1969 and 1982 under the socio-architectural theories of Le Corbusier. Son of an era in which total convergence between the architectural and urban dimensions was pursued, certainly indebted to Le Corbusier's research on collective housing (Unitè d'Habitation, ilot insalubre) and at the same time to the Anglo-Saxon brutalist poetics and utopian visions of the 1960s, the Rozzol Melara complex dominates the city of Trieste and its gulf from above. Imagined as a self-sufficient part of the city for 2,500 inhabitants, the Rozzol Melara project consists of an enormous quadrilateral of 200 metres on each side, cut by a diagonal north-south road that runs under the system of common services consisting of multifunctional spaces, a post office, and an open-air arena, in turn set up on a cardo-decuman system oriented according to the directions of the large enclosure.The endless courtyard-square, extending over more than 3 hectares, interacts in an articulated way with the morphology of the sloping terrain: the quadrilateral is composed of two "L" shaped bodies, one - located upstream - twice as high as the other, facing downstream; the two bodies are connected by metal walkways that make the internal pedestrian street continuous, marked by large porthole windows, which divides the body of the higher "L" into two parts.
