Most architecture trips to Turin are built around the Lingotto, Nervi's exhibition halls and Guarini's Baroque domes. The building that stopped me in my tracks this September is on very few of those itineraries. It is a parish church in Mirafiori Nord, the district that grew up around the Fiat works, sitting in a small park on Piazza Giovanni XXIII a bus ride south-west of the centre.
From the outside the Chiesa del Gesù Redentore is a long brick building with pleated sides and a tall slit down the front. Inside, a mountain of concrete sails over your head without a single column to hold it up, the brick walls zigzag away down both sides of the nave, and the only daylight arrives as shards of triangular light from high level. It is one of the most austere rooms I have stood in, and one of the most moving.
The nave towards the altar. Bare brick, bare concrete, dark stone and timber, with no columns anywhere in the room. RISE Design Studio.
In the early 1950s Mirafiori Nord was still half-built, and its few parishioners made do with a small chapel the locals called the "chiesetta bianca", the little white church. As the housing went up around the car plant, the chapel was quickly outgrown. The first stone of its replacement was laid on 16 October 1955, and the church and parish house were inaugurated in May 1957. The rest of the complex, with an oratory, a cinema-theatre and a weekday chapel, followed in stages and was finished by the end of the 1960s.
The architects were a father and son, working with the engineer Livio Norzi.
The building was noticed straight away. Casabella published it in July 1959, and G. E. Kidder Smith included it in The New Churches of Europe in 1964. Then, outside Turin at least, it slipped quietly out of view.
The brick entrance front, split by a single lancet with a sculpted panel and a triangular tympanum over the doors, reached by a broad flight of steps. RISE Design Studio.
What strikes you first is the mass. What stays with you is the geometry, because the whole church is set out from a single shape: the equilateral triangle.
The Casabella description is unusually precise. The plan is a simple longitudinal hall of about 1,000 m² with no transept. Each long wall is folded seven times, the folds repeating at 60 degrees. The roof is a lattice of reinforced concrete members whose centre lines, drawn on plan, form a net of equilateral triangles 3 m high and roughly 3.4 m along each side. Add a vertical module of 2.45 m and you have a three-dimensional grid that fixes every junction in the building, from the line of the walls to the position of each opening.
You can read the same figure on the way in. The brick entrance front is split by a tall lancet-shaped slit, and at its base the door sits beneath a tympanum in the form of an equilateral triangle, framed by three rings of brick. By the time you are inside, the building has already told you its rule.
Where the concrete lands on the brick: a glazed slot in each rooflight pocket sits directly over the inner angle of a wall fold. RISE Design Studio.
The pleated brick walls are the detail I photographed most, and they are doing far more than making pattern. A flat sheet of paper will not stand on its edge; crease it into a zigzag and it will. The Mossos and Norzi used exactly that principle. The folds act as oblique buttresses, and Casabella makes the point that it is this arrangement that allows the walls themselves to be so thin. The roof lands on the folds, and the folds carry it to the ground.
The brick is left bare, inside and out. There is no plaster, no stone facing and no paint, only the fired clay and the joints, so every facet of the zigzag takes the light at a slightly different angle. The ornament is simply the structure, seen in raking light.
A cross formed in projecting brick on one of the wall folds, under the ribs of the vault. RISE Design Studio.
Overhead, the vault is a field of crossed concrete ribs spanning the full width of the nave, and its great achievement is what is missing: there is not one pier or column inside the church. From below it reads as an enormous weight, a grey folded landscape hanging over the congregation, set against the red of the brick.
In engineering terms it is lighter than it looks. It is a lattice of ribs with faceted infill, and it gets its strength from its depth and its folds, not from sheer thickness. That gap between what the structure weighs and what it feels like it weighs is where a good deal of the building's power comes from.
The reinforced concrete vault is a lattice of triangular ribs, with glazed pockets along its base letting daylight in over the folded brick walls. RISE Design Studio.
The side walls are almost entirely solid, so the daylight has to come from somewhere else. It comes through the roof. Some of the triangular facets of the vault are glazed, and the light drops into the nave from high level in narrow, sharply cut shards that travel across the brick and the concrete through the day.
Because the light is rationed, every piece of it counts. There is no view out and no glare, only a dim, calm room with a slowly moving pattern of triangles above it. It is the opposite of the fully glazed box, and far more memorable.
Even the floor keeps the rule: black stone slabs with pink marble triangles let into the joints. RISE Design Studio.
Turin is the city of Guarino Guarini, and anyone who knows his Chapel of the Holy Shroud, begun in 1668, will feel the connection. There, Guarini stacked arch upon arch into a dome that seems to dissolve into daylight as it rises. Critics have long described the Redentore's crossed ribs as clearly Guarinian, and its faceted, glazed vault as a rationalist answer to the Shroud chapel.
The project history makes the link explicit. According to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Nicola Mosso's first scheme of 1953 was a longer church crowned by a star-shaped dome of Guarinian type. By 1955 the building had been shortened and the dome removed. My own reading is that the dome never really went away: the idea was spread across the entire roof instead. What Guarini did in a Baroque chapel for the House of Savoy, the Mossos did in bare concrete for a working parish on the edge of the city.
Looking back down the nave, where the lancet slit in the brick gable is filled with a stack of triangular panes. RISE Design Studio.
It would be easy to call the church severe and leave it there. But the austerity is a decision, and a generous one. Two materials, brick and concrete, neither of them finished, leave nothing to distract from structure, proportion and light. The one place where the finishes become richer is the chapel of the Virgin, lined in Vicenza marble with mosaic to its piers and beams, and the contrast only sharpens the restraint of the main hall.
The approach has aged well. The concrete roof was restored in 2002 under the architect Massimo Battaglio, and in 2007 the church was recognised in the Architetture Rivelate awards run by Turin's Order of Architects. Nearly seventy years on, there are no linings to replace and no applied finishes to date the interior. It looks, as far as I can tell, very much as it did in the Casabella photographs.
Sean Ronnie Hill under the vault of the Chiesa del Gesù Redentore, September 2026. RISE Design Studio.
We design houses, not churches, and none of our clients has asked for a column-free concrete vault over the kitchen. But three things from Mirafiori apply directly to our work in London.
The church is at Piazza Giovanni XXIII 26, 10137 Torino, in a small park in Mirafiori Nord. It is a working parish church, so check the mass times, visit outside them and keep your voice down. It has also featured in past editions of Open House Torino, when the restoration architect has been on hand to show people round. Allow an hour, and look up.
If you are planning a home where structure, light and honest materials are the starting point, we'd be glad to talk it through. Please do get in touch.
→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
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