The postcard takes the building from its best corner. A rusticated base carries a giant order up through the middle floors; arched windows sit deep between the columns; sculpture crowds the crowning above the cornice. Beside it, a two-storey survivor of the older street waits its turn. One black motorcar stands at the kerb of an otherwise empty cobbled crossing — the telephone company’s palace photographed at the moment the telephone was still a novelty. This exact view is reproduced as “the 1925 building” in the 2021 study by Manuela Incerti, Gianmarco Mei and Anna Castagnoli, because the state it records no longer exists: the front was later raised with a second giant order, and what the postcard shows survives only on paper.

The palace was state property — Mario Gabinio photographed it as the “Palazzo dei Telefoni di Stato” on 9 August 1924 — and it was already serving Turin’s telephone administration when STIPEL, the newly founded concessionaire for Piedmont and Lombardy, made it its headquarters in 1925. Space ran short almost immediately. An extension on the via Confienza side was requested in 1936; from early 1939 Ubaldo Castagnoli developed the project for a new seven-storey building on via Meucci, 61.40 by 28.15 metres, with two basement levels including an air-raid shelter — a detail that reads differently once you know what followed. Between November 1942 and December 1943 four Allied raids hit the block, wrecking the roof and three of the floors.

Castagnoli (Rome 1902 – Turin 1982) is the reason this office building has a place in the history of Italian architecture. A founding member of Gruppo 7 in 1926 — the seven young rationalists, Giuseppe Terragni among them, whose manifesto articles announced modern architecture in Italy — he left the group in the autumn of 1927 for a post at STIPEL, and stayed until 1957. On the roof of the new building he designed something Italy had not seen: a suspended open-air pool for the employees, first drawn in July 1940 and redrawn in February 1942 — a tank of five by fifteen metres, a metre and a half deep, thirty-two metres above the street. A company newsreel of 1941 shows the dopolavoristi swimming lengths with the Turin skyline at eye level. The pool outlived the company’s tenure by a few years only: STIPEL’s successor moved to corso Inghilterra in 1968, the pool disappeared in the early 1970s, and today the land registry fills the offices.