Immediately after the Grand Slam, the ATP Finals come to the world tennis agenda: Turin is the destination, now in the middle of its five-year term. Since 2021, the tournament has been accompanied by an annual tennis takeover of the city, in a collective attention to the clay court that has now become an aesthetic obsession, crowned by cinematic imageries a la Challengers, and the constant presence in the news of Sinner or Alcaraz, almost more with their lives than with their matches.

The event therefore attracts thousands of spectators to the subalpine city, but also a fan base that’s not necessarily made of ticket holders, and it is difficult to take a sport like tennis out of the arenas and make its spaces trigger an exchange with those of the surrounding city.

This is precisely what Benedetto Camerana's project with the Awe Sport consortium – winners of the competition launched by the Italian Tennis Federation (FIT) for 2020 – is based on: a design philosophy standing on a network of punctual interventions interwoven with the city, now almost an identifying feature of Turin, which had already adopted the same strategy for the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Installations in the city centre, then the Fan Village in the large Piazza d'Armi park, opposite the arena where the tournament will be played. The classic great-event commercial areas, then an architecture acting as the core of this whole system of exchange between the tournament and the city’s population: the Winter Garden, a bioclimatic greenhouse with four pickleball courts inside (it is not padel, still it remains in the genre), screens to watch the games from outside the stadium, several playgrounds, all immersed in a bamboo forest that goes along with the inevitable reference to Italian gardens.

A degree of coexistence between artifice and vegetation that the designer had already articulated in the reversible greenery used for the rooftop track at Lingotto, which has become an extension of Renzo Piano’s Pinacoteca Agnelli.
Latest news, the Italian Federation has introduced a ticket to enter the village, still it remains ridiculously cheap compared to the prices in the arena.

Then comes the arena itself: now it is the Inalpi Arena, named after its current sponsor, but since 2006 it has been known as the Palasport Olimpico, a project for the Winter Olympics that bears the main signature of Arata Isozaki. This location brings us to two main issues. One is a clarification: the ATP Finals will be played on indoor concrete – not red clay, as the incipit might have suggested, but that was a matter of evocative imagery – so they do not require major interventions, at least on the court front.

The other is a process of adaptation, designed for a an already adaptive structure: interacting with the variable space of the foyer, created by mobile stands, a second level of mezzanines in a light metal structure creates corporate areas, relaxation areas, athletes’ locker rooms, a concentration area and a physiotherapy area, and above all the hybrid space of the Shared Lounge, which represents the spirit of the project inside the arena, just as the Winter Garden does for urban spaces.