Story

The commission arrived on the heels of one of Bologna’s most aggressive interwar urban operations. Beginning in 1934, a long axis was driven through the medieval fabric west of Piazza Maggiore, demolishing entire blocks of Via delle Lame and Via San Felice to open the broad, straight Via Roma, later renamed Via Marconi. The Azienda del Gas, the municipal gas company, secured a prominent lot on the new street and asked Alberto Legnani, an architect with a steady portfolio of office and residential work in the city, to design its headquarters. Petrucci handled the structural engineering, with a steel and reinforced-concrete skeleton that allowed the long, uninterrupted facade lines the brief required. Site work began in 1935 and the building was completed the following year, in the same season that saw a wave of new institutional palazzi rise along the corridor.

The result follows the calmer, classicising current of Italian rationalism rather than the sharper international wing led by Terragni in Como. The facade is symmetrical and tripartite, with a heavy stone base, a tall central body opened by regular bays of vertical windows, and a recessed attic. Stone cladding is laid in narrow ashlar courses, dressed flush and almost without moulding, so the wall reads as a single planar surface rather than as a sequence of orders.

The composition refuses ornament except in one decisive register. Above the second floor, Bruno Boari’s bas-relief frieze runs the full width of the building, with stylised figures of workers, flames, distillation towers, and lamp standards narrating the cycle of gas from production to domestic use. The strip is set deep into the wall plane, so the figures catch the morning light without breaking the surface continuity that rationalism demanded. It is the one element on the facade where the building lets itself speak, and it speaks about industrial labour as openly as any public mural of the period.

The Azienda del Gas occupied the palazzo through the postwar municipal reorganisations that eventually merged the gas service into Hera, the multi-utility company that still uses parts of the building as offices. The structure survived the bombing of Bologna in 1943 and 1944 with minor damage, and the facade has been cleaned and consolidated several times since the 1990s under the supervision of the Soprintendenza. It is listed in the Comune di Bologna’s inventory of twentieth-century architectural heritage and is studied as one of the clearest local examples of the way Italian rationalism, in mid-sized cities, negotiated between official Novecento monumentality and the leaner abstract language coming out of Milan and Como. The frieze in particular is now read as a rare programmatic statement on industrial modernity carved into the public surface of an interwar Italian street.