Saturday 10 and Sunday, June 11, 2023 Open House Torino – at its sixth edition – is going to offer the opportunity to discover more than 130 special places of the city usually closed to the public. Here is our selection.
Palazzo Regione Piemonte
In via Nizza, the 205-meter high skyscraper designed by Massimiliano Fuksas houses the offices of the Piedmont Region since December 2022. The observation platform, on the 43rd floor, is the highest ever among those on Italian skyscrapers and houses its own garden composed of local vegetation, including trees, shrubs and aromatic plants that recreate the different environments present in the Piedmontese territory.
Dancing Le Roi
A real jewel of Turin architecture, as well as a must for the vips of the sixties, the Dancing Le Roi designed by Carlo Mollino for the Lutrario family houses a ballroom that seems to dance wrapping on itself, with a spiral of one hundred colored lamps. The care to detail is absolute: mosaics, peculiar stairs, wrought iron elements, stained glass doors with golden “L”, majolica and mirrors form a real treasure chest of fun that takes us back in time.
Orti Generali
On the edge of the city, where Mirafiori Sud district touches the course of Sangone stream, behind the church of San Barnaba and at the entrance of the Piedmont Park, there are Orti Generali, a shared city-farm that provides 160 fenced plots to cultivate with the help of agronomists and landscapers. The space recovered by the initiative (a non-profit enterprise of the City of Turin, which has been able to involve more than a thousand members), is also an educational center on organic farming with a small farm. In 2023 the project won Italian National Landscape Prize, the most important Italian award for the category.
Molecular Biotechnology Center (MBC)
Also in Via Nizza, the university school of biotechnology in bare concrete designed by Luciano Pia and completed in 2006, under its glass ceiling houses a winter garden that serves as an internal courtyard, recalling the mechanisms of nature that students investigate day after day.
Ranch urbano
Among the numerous houses opened on the occasion of the event, a particularly interesting example is the Ranch Urbano. The house with (future) co-working was created by Wworks, a couple of designers who transformed the spaces of an old workshop in Cenisia into a place to live as if they were far away from the city. The name was given by the neighbors, intrigued by the wooden structure that grew gradually in the center of the block, like a kind of forest.
If these places have stimulated your desire to explore, the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Civic Centre is also worth a visit. Built in the late eighties, the Bonhoeffer – named after a German Protestant theologian of the twentieth century – resembles a brutalist UFO landed on the outskirts of the streets of South Turin. It houses some services of District 8 and a library of the Turin Civic Libraries network. The building will soon be subject to redevelopment works.
Open House Torino extends also this year beyond the city limits. In Chieri, you should definitely go to Atelier Fleuriste, by Elastico spa. In the internal garden of a nineteenth-century house recovered in 2008 was built a new building with a large window overlooking the street, with a thin veil of water that flows on its surface as a cooling. The project, which interacts in a very interesting way with a disordered urban context, gives shape to exhibition, commercial and residential spaces, populated by an aesthetic reminiscent of the Sigurd Lewerentz flower stand in Malmö.
