This portal collects digitized versions of the rare books and the historical collections of Politecnico di Torino's Libraries in addition to the texts digitized for projects shared with the libraries of the City of Turin. Digit aims to enhance, preserve and make accessible rare and valuable volumes: we respect national and international guidelines and standards for digitization in order to make our texts recoverable through Internet search engines and to offer scholars the opportunity to enjoy the historical and cultural heritage of Politecnico di Torino.
The attention and involvement for the local problems of the city and the surrounding area, attested by the essays herein published: from the debate on the Mole Antonelliana to the one on innovative transport means, from Turin urbanistic documents to Piedmontese historical cartography, from monographic issues dedicated to national and international congresses to the biographic ones focused on the figure and works of the scholars who contributed to in-depth studies on sciences and techniques applied to engineering and architecture.
Publishing on-line the historical yearbooks of the Politecnico di Torino is one of the rare examples among European Universities. This way, the main source of knowledge is made available about the memory of people and activities of our University.
Go to the Yearbooks
The Poliscriptorium Project started in 2002, as an initiative by prof. Marchis, director of CEMED (now Museum of Politecnico). Its goal was to digitize textual, iconographic and multimedia materials, which were in danger of being completely lost, due to the physical decay of the medium they were stored on (acid paper, magnetic materials, etc.). The Project aimed to maintain digital formats always in line with the evolution of both hardware and software, and focused mainly, but not exclusively, on the preservation of documents related to technology development and "polytechnical culture" in general.
The collection includes books in first edition, illustrations, magazines and documents testifying the origin of science fiction, starting from the first half of '800 until the first half of the twentieth century.
The project arises from the collaboration between the MUFANT - Museolab del Fantastico e della Fantascienza and the Progetto bibliotecario urbano sul pubblico dominio (Urban library project on public domain, by the Università di Torino, Città di Torino - Biblioteche civiche torinesi, Politecnico di Torino). It digitizes and makes them available online, documents belonging to the "Riccardo Valla" collection, now physically preserved by the MuFant in a room dedicated to the proto-science fiction.
Politecnico di Torino's libraries joined this collaboration with enthusiasm, given the undoubted relation between science fiction and science and technology. Nobody can deny that some technologies have foreseen realities of nowadays: mobile phones, radar, robots, videophones are just a few of the "scientific acquisitions" from science fiction movies and novels.
The analysis of the photographic collection owned by the Main Library of Engineering (especially the hints provided by the stamps on the pictures' positives) made it possible to reconstruct an ancient and forgotten asset already present in its original core at the Scuola di Applicazione per gli Ingegneri: the one of the Gabinetto di Architettura Antica e Tecnica degli Stili.
The e-book is the catalogue of an exhibition that was held at the Politecnico in 2015. The exhibition showed the photographic, books and documents collections once owned by the Gabinetto di Architettura, a laboratory active in the period from 1885 to about the Thirties of the Twentieth Century.
The work contains essays framing the shown collections into the didactics of the Scuola di Applicazione per gli Ingegneri before, and lately of the Regio Politecnico.
In 1902, 1903 and 1904 the Associazione Elettrotecnica Italiana AEI (Italian Electrotechnical Association) published all the works by Galileo Ferraris in a precious collection composed of 3 monographs, which are a thorough way to know and study his writings and his main outcomes. The first volume contains an interestingpreface by Guido Grassi.
L'Arte di Fabbricare, encyclopedic work by Giovanni Curioni, professor at Scuola di applicazione per gli ingegneri since 1862, was written in 6 volumes and 6 appendices from 1864 through 1884.
Besides the scientific contribute to the profession, to the teaching and to the needs of the contemporary society, the importance of the publications by Curioni lies especially in having outlined a cross section of the technical and theoretical changes of his epoch, hanging between innovation and tradition, and even more in having made clear the role and the disciplinary field of the new-born construction science. In addition to providing the academic and professional readers with a huge amount of notions, regulations, postulates and formulas supporting science and practice of building, the single editions, published by Augusto Federico Negro, are supplied with an extraordinary quantity of graphic material (plates, schemas and drawings), in order to ease the usage of the work and, by using practical examples, the comprehension of the statements included in the texts, or the problems existing between theory and practice.
La rivista "Arte Italiana Decorativa e Industriale" (AIDI) viene pubblicata dal 1890 al 1911 per complessive 20 annate sotto la direzione di Camillo Boito.
La rivista è lo strumento di divulgazione di una didattica istituzionale che ha per focus specifico il mondo della produzione artistica nell'era della rivoluzione industriale, ed è il più eclatante prodotto della Commissione Centrale per l'insegnamento artistico industriale (1884-1908), organo ministeriale composto dalle principali autorità in campo artistico e architettonico, che per un quarto di secolo provvede a un riesame complessivo dell'eredità artistica e culturale del paese costruendo una "grammatica dell'ornato italiano".
Journal founded and directed by Guido Canella. Across the 34 issues published between 1977 and 1985, the magazine addressed — in monographic form and with a consistently historical-critical as well as operative-design approach — topics ranging from the principal typologies of collective life (museum, theatre, school and university, fair and world exhibitions, hospitals, prisons and total institutions, cemeteries, and others) to more directly historical and disciplinary questions (such as the features and specific identity of Italian architecture from 1945 to the early 1960s, or the role and vicissitudes of cultural institutions like the Triennale di Milano), and to individual figures or generations in Italian and international architecture (for instance, “Oscar Niemeyer or Formality in Architecture”, the generation of international architects born in 1925, and others).
A research journal open to the realm of ideas, in which one often finds writings and interviews by figures external to the practice of design yet internal to the wider world of design culture — administrators, intellectuals, protagonists of the political and cultural landscape — seeking that dialogue with institutions which has all too often been absent from the construction of the contemporary city.
The very structure of the journal, published in Italian with English and French translations, and with a layout reflecting its character, interweaves essayistic texts with anthological reconstructions and thematic iconographic files, suggesting rigorous and stimulating parallel paths of reading.
Journal directed by Guido Canella, the ideal continuation of the historic periodical founded by Adriano Olivetti in 1957. The new series under Canella's direction, issued semi-annually and published in both Italian and English (as was the earlier Olivetti series), appeared in 21 issues between 1989 and 1999.
In the first issue, at the conclusion of a dense editorial, Canella briefly outlines the reasons that led him to accept the proposal to «resurrect this illustrious journal»: not to produce a magazine of trends, but with the will and the aim «to bring history back to criticism, now so wayward», to contribute «to making the commissioning of architecture less precarious and incompetent […] increasingly conditioned by an ambiguous public-private relationship», and above all to respond to the fundamental and urgent need «to privilege the principle of authenticity over the functional and formal counterfeits of design», to «root international comparison in the contextuality of each typological and figurative experience» — objectives, Canella adds, substantially similar to those pursued thirty years earlier by Adriano Olivetti.
Each of the 21 issues, featuring contributions from some of the most important historians, critics, and architects of the Italian and international scene, opens with a dense editorial in which Canella sets out, with critical and operational depth, the cultural line of the journal and the cognitive and disciplinary orientation of the themes addressed.
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