MQCvisions

The Great Repairs Workshops (OGR - Officine per le Grandi Riparazioni) are one of the most significant industrial structures in Turin.
They have been built between 1885 and 1895, to do maintenance and 'great repairs' to steam engines and train wagons. Thanks to this activity, at the begin of 1900, a social transformation begun. New industries have been built, those years, around these ones, and a first big immigration wave started the deep change in the social structure of the city that still now we can appreciate.
These buildings cover a 31000 square meters area. They have been used to repair train engines until the seventies.
The demolition was already decided in the eighties. A citizens' committee stopped the process, and the OGR had been simply 'closed' for more than twenty years.
Here you *feel* our industrial past, with all its sufferings, emotions, illuministic optimism, pollution... the good, the bad and the ugly of our modern history, everything in one place.
Those great neglected examples of our industrial past are now considered 'uncomfortable to the eyes', and people would prefer seeing a big new shopping center made of steel and glass, instead of ornate cast iron and bricks attacked by ivy...