Reviving Lingotto - mixed development, Turin, Italy

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 1996

In evolving strategies for the future, the legacy of the past must not be neglected. Here, the vast, heroic, industrial structure of the Fiat factory in Turin, is in the process of becoming an armature for an inspiring variety of new uses.

In Europe especially, a large part of architectural practice in the future will be rehabilitating buildings. Usually this involves not just conserving the old building, but also finding a new use for it (which might tax creativity itself) and converting it accordingly. In the vast old Fiat factory at Lingotto, the challenge for the Renzo Piano Building Workshop was to incorporate a collection of new uses that would interact so vigorously that the building would be as important to Turin and its region in the twenty-first century as it has been in the twentieth. In the process, what was built as a purely functional machine, but had been recognised immediately as an artistic monument, is becoming a megastructural microcosm of the city.

Lingotto is the most famous of all factories. Longer than an ocean liner, built entirely in concrete and with cars whizzing around its steeply banked roof-top test track, it was a prime icon of early Modernism: three photographs of it grace Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture. History books say the factory was inspired by a 1912 trip to the USA by Fiat's founder, V. G. Agnelli. During this trip Agnelli visited the Ford plant in Detroit, saw applied there the Scientific Management principles of F. W. Taylor and also saw other concrete-framed multi-storey factories. But the truth is more complex: there are multi-storey, concrete-framed Fiat factories in Turin built prior to 1912. Nevertheless, after this trip Agnelli commissioned civil engineer Giacomo Matte-Trucco to design the vast factory, built between 1915 and 1921, which housed Europe's longest production line.

The original building consists of a pair of parallel five-storey slabs, running roughly north-south, and joined by service towers of stairs and lavatories that separate four courtyards. At each end, helicoidal ramps, whose centres are a little over 500 m apart, took cars up to and down from the roof. Forward from this building's east elevation, and slightly slewed to align with the street, is the palazzina that was the administration block. Beyond the southern ramp was the vast single-storied press shop where steel panels were shaped.

Built as a functional machine, the factory was soon judged an art monument. Much of its architectural potency comes from the aesthetic tension between what are almost a pair of dialectical oppositions. One is between the seemingly endless extrusion and repetitive rhythms of the factory block and the contrasting dynamism and finiteness of form invested by the roof-top track's banked ends. The other is between the understatement of the very functional and frugal forms and the vestigial classical touches. The latter include the mouldings on the concrete frame and ramps, and the roof-level cornice. No doubt these tensions, between mechanistic functionalism and timeless order, appealed to Le Corbusier.

Like any machine, a functionalist factory tightly tailored to a particular mode of manufacture has a limited life. Car assembly changed radically during the 1970s. Robots replaced manpower, and linear assembly lines were replaced by a process that is in concept more radial and centripetal: components are made independently (in the same factory or elsewhere) and brought together to be assembled at a fixed spot. Lingotto, with its long narrowish floors and constant 6 x 6 m column grid, did not suit such a process and so was obsolete.

But by this time Fiat was both Italy's leading industrial enterprise and its prime corporate patron of arts and culture. It could not countenance demolishing a masterwork like the Lingotto factory. Recognising that no single use could now fill such a vast structure, Fiat resolved to convert it into a multi-functional resource for Turin and its region. Ideas were invited from a group of leading international architects, who inevitably turned the exercise into a design competition. Most strove to outdo each other in spectacularly mutilating the factory. The scheme that best respected the old building was by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, leading to its selection, in a public poll at the exhibition of architectural proposals, as the scheme preferred by Turin's populace.

Piano's proposal for a centre of technological innovation, entrepreneurial initiative, and cultural creativity left the old building virtually intact, though later accretions around its base were cleared. In their place were auditoria and parking garages mounded over with earth and planting. Paths climbed these mounds to the first floor that was the main public circulation level. Below this were uses requiring vehicular access, such as start up (incubator?) units for new workshop-based businesses, or intense pedestrian circulation, such as exhibition halls, galleries and auditoria. Above this level were uses requiring no vehicular access and less intense pedestrian access. Reflecting the fashion of the times and giving the whole a suitably festive air, there was a profusion of tensile structures and suspended awnings. These intensified the image of the building as a huge ship in a rolling sea of greenery. But this image was at odds with the sobriety of the old building, and isolated it from the surrounding city.