Building Techniques and Architectural Quality of Motorway Restaurants in Italy

Motorway restaurant bridge buildings began to be erected along Italian motorways in the second half of the Twentieth Century. The Mottagrill in Limena by Pier Luigi Nervi and Melchiorre Bega, built in 1967, is a peculiar example of this architecture for the role of reinforced concrete construction. It stands out for the unitary concept of design and building techniques resulting in the efficiency of the structural system, the expressivity of the large exposed concrete elements, and the control of the building sequence during construction. These features and the affinities between the Limena design and the experimentation carried out by Nervi on motorway restaurants for the Motta company in the previous years highlight Nervi's central role in this development.