The new operations headquarters of Reale Group in Turin was opened in October 2016, not far from Piazza Castello, in the heart of the historical centre. The new spaces accommodate 800 work stations, 150 car parking spaces and a conference room for 280 people. It is an important and ambitious project aimed at ensuring innovative standards in the building performances but also focused on generating a new urban redevelopment process through attentive dialogue with the city.
The architecture defines a contemporary insertion in the heart of the historical centre: a new construction that represents a significant replacement project achieved without taking up additional land.
The new innovative and highly comfortable offices cover a built area of 23,500 square metres, giving form to a building that redefines the urban block highlighting the presence of an internal courtyard covering 1,700 square metres, visible from the street front. All the spaces help to achieve an excellent quality work environment and define an urban campus that exists in synergy with the historical site. Certified as class A2, the new complex complies with all the highest energy standards and has the characteristics to attain the international LEED Platinum certification.
The architects (Iotti + Pavarani Architetti together with Artecna), have redefined the urban block through a project that involves the volumetric organization and design of the external façades and those facing onto the internal courtyard. The entire complex takes on board the surrounding area and “absorbs” a protected historical façade (that on Via Bertola and Via San Dalmazzo), creating a compositional solution in harmony with the surrounding buildings.
The architectural envelope becomes a fulcrum, a gravitational hub in the urban fabric of this part of the surrounding centre of Turin: it focuses the attention on itself and, through a simple and rigorous arrangement of the four façades, defines a contemporary intervention which is at the same time intimately linked to the place, simultaneously generating the conditions for high energy efficiency and excellent exploitation of the light.
As a counterpoint to the external envelope exposed to the urban context, a more transparent and subtle façade surrounds the internal courtyard, which fits with the furnished garden. A clad counterfaçade system with shaped profiles of anodized aluminium in different colours screens the doors, windows and glass partitions creating the effect of a vibrant “artificial forest” sensitive to changes in the natural light.