Tipologia Concorso // Luogo Torino, Italy // Timetable 2023-2024 // Committenza Fondazione Compagnia di SanPaolo // Superficie 20.000+ mq // Stato Completed // Project Team Balance Architettura, 2Mix, Archisbang, Bollinger+Grohmann, TetraStudio // Altri Componenti Sintel, Lucio Rubini, Francesca Canfora, Studio Corradino Petitti.
The redevelopment Project, resulting from an International Two-Phase Competition, involved the complete redesign of the Cavallerizza Reale complex, returning this significant portion of Turin's Historic Center to the city.
The density of the traces testifies an urban history that, within its walls, has found an incredibly fertile scenario over the centuries: projects, superimpositions, fragments.
These elements were embraced and narrated as the true potential of a complex and active space. The fundamental elements of our proposal were the reconnection of open spaces through gateways revealing new squares and unexplored courtyards, unexpected shortcuts eliminating separations and merging the complex with the rest of the city.
The concept of heritage expands into the social sphere, preventing cities and memory from becoming static. The city enters the Cavallerizza and the Cavallerizza opens to the community, a porous and welcoming artistic and cultural hub, accessible 24/7.
Creating a new civic attraction within the walls of a historically introverted, military-style complex necessarily requires significant transformation. The project responds to the Competition Brief with a clear program introducing new elements to complete the activation framework:
1. A fully permeable ground level featuring open spaces, covered areas, and traversable public functions available to students, performers, spectators, and citizens at all hours.
2. Three reinterpreted entrance thresholds inviting exploration: the open arches of Via Rossini, the Via Verdi cut along the visual axis to Corso Vittorio, and the rediscovered Gardens passage.
3. A horizontal impulse: the abstract grid built on the ancient bastion matrix, illuminated and furnished to become an iconic recognizable landmark.
4. A vertical impulse: a lightweight belvedere embodying an ancient aspiration already explored in the Theatrum Statuum Sabaudiae, towering over the Castellamontiana Rotunda to face the Mole, reminding us that cities and eras must preserve their symbols while also adding new ones.
5. An innovative and sustainable headquarters for an authoritative Foundation that has been at the forefront of Turin's cultural development for centuries.
6. A conversion that does not reconstruct but uses voids to accommodate citizens and nature in the new urban platform dedicated to culture.
7. A careful and delicate restoration preserving and differentiating, reinterpreting without forgetting, and authentically restoring the patina of time.
