The MAST (Manufacture Arts Experimentation Technology) multipurpose building - steel structures for urban transformation

The linear architecture of the MAST (Manufacture Arts Experimentation Technology) multipurpose building in Bologna hides a complex combination of functions and spaces surrounding the core of the building and forms its raison d'être: the sublimation of innovation in manufacturing industry within the retrospective heritage of art and its projection in human memory. In this way, factors normally regarded as secondary to industrial activity become a central part of it and are acknowledged as its true roots and instinctive vision. The building acts as the vehicle for a declaration that there are no innovative ideas other than those arising from the interaction between memory and the capacity to project. The functional distribution traces a passage from emotive education (nursery) through formal teaching (classrooms) and the conservation of memory (museum and exhibition area) to listening (auditorium). Each function is acknowledged, not as a self-contained unit, but rather as a component part of the driving force of innovation, which propels a capacity for technological process that is anything but sterile. In such a setting, the steel structures are the very symbol of the transition from tradition to innovation [1].