Luca Guadagnino is shooting a film between Piedmont (Northern Italy) and California, and in doing so he brings a Renzo Piano building to the big screen for the first time: the Intesa Sanpaolo Tower. Since 2015, the 167-meter skyscraper with its rooftop greenhouse has dominated Turin’s skyline, celebrating in 2025 its first decade as a new symbol of the contemporary city.
According to Corriere della Sera, the tower is one of the chosen locations for Artificial, Guadagnino’s latest work inspired by the story of Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, dismissed and then reinstated at the company he co-founded, OpenAI.
Other standout architectural settings will accompany the skyscraper by RPBW in the film, including Cino Zucchi’s Nuvola Lavazza headquarters and the Olivetti buildings in Ivrea, particularly the canteen designed by Ignazio Gardella between the late 1950s and early 1960s. With its exposed modernist structure and distinctive hexagonal plan embracing the ground and opening the interior to the surrounding landscape, the building remains a landmark of the city and its industrial history.
Although part of the production will unfold in the United States, it’s striking that this “tech film” takes root in Italy’s historic cradles of technological innovation: Turin, the city of the automobile, and Ivrea, home of early computing. Their spaces and built forms once again become protagonists of a narrative.
Architecture has long been a leading character in Guadagnino’s cinema, he had told Domus in 2022 of his fascination with interiors, and he is himself a designer. His films are built on the meticulous crafting of space, whether in the lyrical Northern-Italian atmospheres of Call Me by Your Name, the tennis-drenched spaces of Challengers, or the scale-model Mexico City conceived with Jonathan Anderson. Iconic buildings have often starred in his stories: Piero Portaluppi’s Villa Necchi Campiglio in the bourgeois melodrama I Am Love, or the abandoned halls of Giuseppe Sommaruga’s Grand Hotel Campo dei Fiori, the haunting stage of demoniac aesthetic hallucinations in the remake of Suspiria, a masterpiece from Italian horror maestro Dario Argento.
Image at top: Photo Massimo Parisi from Adobe Stock