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Grattacielo Piemonte

205-metre tower designed by Massimiliano Fuksas at Lingotto, seat of the Piedmont Region government since 2022 after an eleven-year building site.

The Grattacielo Piemonte ("Piedmont Skyscraper") is the tower housing the executive and offices of the Piedmont Region. It stands in Turin at piazza Piemonte 1, on the site of the former Fiat Avio plant,[1] along via Nizza in the Lingotto area.[2] Designed by Massimiliano Fuksas, the tower measures 204.96 metres overall[3] and, at handover, was presented as the third-tallest building in Italy.[4] The building site, opened in 2011, closed in 2022 after the bankruptcy of three contractors and lengthy work stoppages.[4]

A twenty-year project

The idea was to bring together in a single building all the regional offices, until then spread across ten operating sites around the city with over two thousand employees.[3] Fuksas's first sketch predates the building's handover by twenty-one years, and the tender and the purchase of the land came before the building site itself.[4] On 13 October 2009 the Region approved, with executive resolution no. 1-12346, the programme agreement for works in the Avio-Oval area, the planning framework for the "urban transformation zone" created within the perimeter of the old factory.[5] The site was officially opened on 30 November 2011 by the Region's president Roberto Cota; the works director was Luigi Robino.[6]

The never-ending building site

Five companies worked on the site in succession, three of which went bankrupt, and each bankruptcy meant a halt in the works.[4] One of these stoppages, lasting two years, followed the bankruptcy of Coopsette and the "laborious reassignment of the works to a new consortium": in April 2022 la Repubblica called the project "Turin's oldest building site". At that point workers had completed 31 of the 42 internal floors, and the regional councillor for assets Andrea Tronzano summed it up: "It took us two years to solve the many problems, and now we're moving fast."[7]

In July 2022, inaugurating the new access roads, president Alberto Cirio described the project he had inherited from previous administrations as follows:[8]

"It's an important step towards completing the skyscraper that will be the Region's single headquarters […] which I had inherited on taking office, like so many other things, stalled, tangled up in bureaucracy, and even in wrongdoing."

Alberto Cirio, 5 July 2022

That stretch of road measures 900 metres, 660 of which are covered, cost 32.3 million euros and took 1,056 days of work; it will also serve the future Parco della Salute. Mayor Stefano Lo Russo placed it within the redevelopment of the whole area.[8]

What it cost

Final figures diverge. According to Cirio, at the start of 2022 the skyscraper had cost around 236 million euros and would save around 18 million a year in rent and other costs; the Radicali disputed the calculation, putting it at 336 million once remediation and design costs were included.[9] On the day of handover, la Repubblica's headline spoke of "a decade and 284 million."[10] At the ceremony Cirio cited an annual saving of between 15 and 18 million.[4]

The tower and the service centre

The complex comprises three parts: the office tower, the service centre, and 38,000 square metres of parking across three underground levels, with 1,138 parking spaces, 1,000 of them public and 138 reserved for the Region. The tower, built of reinforced concrete and glass, has 42 floors above ground; the top of the last floor slab stands at 183.61 metres. The service centre, on the west side of the underground courtyard, houses the Region's conference centre and the libraries of the Regional Council and of Ires.[3]

At the top, on the 43rd floor, is a terrace with a teak floor and a greenhouse of alpine herbs; in the representative spaces the floor is in green Alpine marble, and a glazed tunnel connects the tower to the service centre.[9] There are 1,913 workstations, and the president's office occupies the 40th floor.[7] At around 204 metres, the tower is some thirty metres taller than the Intesa Sanpaolo skyscraper.[10] For energy it uses geothermal and photovoltaic power, with self-sufficiency of over 30%, uses no gas and recovers rainwater.[2] The top two floors are to house a panoramic garden open to Piedmontese residents and tourists.[3]

Handover and move

The Region took charge of the building on 14 October 2022, with a ceremony on the square on via Nizza.[2] On that occasion Cirio announced its name: "It will be called Grattacielo Piemonte […] since this building was paid for by the people of Piedmont," and said that a wound was being healed that day.[4] On 19 December 2022 the first offices moved in: the Presidency, Vice-Presidency, the President's Cabinet and the executive; departments, directorates and sectors followed in 2023.[11] With decree no. 46 of 13 October 2023 the institutional seat of the executive was officially transferred to piazza Piemonte 1.[12] The Region's historic palace on piazza Castello, Cirio said at the handover, would not be sold, and was proposed as the seat of the European anti-money-laundering authority.[4]

The surrounding area

Beneath the tower, the soil and water table of the former Fiat Avio site were polluted, chiefly with hexavalent chromium. Between 2015 and 2017 around 25,000 cubic metres of soil were removed from zone 5 and 13,000 from the so-called Poligono Tedesi, and replaced with certified soil; the water table was treated with bio-remediation, which reduces hexavalent chromium to the trivalent form. In preparatory works for the Parco della Salute, begun on 28 December 2021, asbestos-containing materials, an air-raid shelter and tunnels resurfaced.[13] The plan for the area includes a large public park towards Lingotto station and a pedestrian and cycle footbridge with a photovoltaic roof linking the station underpass to via Nizza.[2]

Pages linking here

Related articles: Alberto Cirio, Intesa Sanpaolo Skyscraper, Piemonte

Sources

  1. Regione Piemonte
  2. Regione Piemonte — 14 October 2022
  3. Regione Piemonte
  4. Cuneo24 — 15 October 2022
  5. Regione Piemonte
  6. Regione Piemonte — 30 November 2011
  7. la Repubblica Torino — 2 April 2022
  8. ANSA — 5 July 2022
  9. La Stampa — 5 January 2022
  10. la Repubblica Torino — 15 October 2022
  11. Regione Piemonte — 2 January 2023
  12. Regione Piemonte — 13 October 2023
  13. Regione Piemonte

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