La metamorfosi (three competitions)
Transformation of a city, Torino 2010

The multitude that will animate the cities of the future will ask to live in very different ways and to share a collective project. The city is the tool that can help to achieve this, promoting different lifestyles and making a common project visible, being able to involve all citizens. Future Torino must therefore be a tolerant, open, multi-faceted city, and at the same time it must make visible (first and foremost to its inhabitants) a project in which it can be identify. Future Torino must be sustainable; it will have to face its problems from an intelligently global point of view, and evaluate urban strategies taking into account all the complex sets of reciprocal influences that are produced in the city. The Sustainable City is in the first place a city that takes into account all the needs of its inhabitants, a city that activates multiple energies in a common project and openly expands this project so that it is easy to contribute to it. The architecture of this city of the future can only be, according to the beautiful definition of Mies van der Rohe, the visible expression of a point of view that others want to share.
At “Spina 4”, different urban fabrics meet along a large road axis. Huge traffic flows add up to a great urban density, defining an intense and metropolitan place, located at a point of contact between the historic city and its uncertain periphery. The contradictions that have accumulated over time on this site need not be hidden. In the area we design three large buildings with a complex program, grouped around a colossal round of 200 m in diameter. A pedestrian “square” appears in the most unexpected place, the only one possible: at the center of the traffic junction. The large roundabout solves all mobility and urban planning issues by defining a metropolitan pole in the midst of complicated and incoherent urban tissues.