"Turin is a house".
The project of the “Terrazzo” of Porta Nuova station
When we began designing the Porta Nuova station, in the usual search for a meaning of our work, a text read a few years earlier came to our help, Giuseppe Culicchia's "Torino è casa mia" (Turin is my house), in which Turin, like every house, was described as "spacious, to be shared with everyone, starting from the entrance, Porta Nuova, with a kitchen, the Porta Palazzo market, a living room, Piazza San Carlo and so on".
It is nice to be able to confirm, on the eve of the opening of the refurbished spaces, that said text and the emotion of dealing with a Common Good of such importance, accompanied us on our journey in every decision, even details-wise.
THE ENTRANCE
The building can be defined as the main gateway to the city, a place that allows you to reach the city center in a few steps. The embryo of the current structure was in fact built where one of the gates of the new southern districts of Turin had risen, at a time of great expansion of the new city and the station was built along the scenic axis of Via Roma up to Piazza San Carlo and Piazza Castle.
THE CENTRAL NAVE
Starting from the first surveys, we had understood the importance of the central nave, with the roof previously built in iron and glass, now in glass and concrete, as typical of nineteenth-century stations, whose reading had been lost over the years.
What seemed remarkable to us was above all the unique and majestic spatiality that this intention could restore to the building, the charm that the most significant monumental stations in the world emanate, especially the famous Grand Central Terminal in New York.
THE URBAN ROLE
From that moment, the recovery of this urban identity, the danger of its transformation into a non-place, was our main concern.
Scrolling through the images of the Grandi Stazioni Archive, that intuition allowed us to interpret in this sense the restructuring of the mezzanine floor, which we began to define "Il Terrazzo", once again using the metaphor of the house as a city, imagining the pleasure of contemplation of the volume of the entire central nave of the building.
THE CULTURAL HERITAGE
What intrigued us of said images was the testimony of the transformations and evolutions of architecture, starting from the solution of moving the tracks from the central nave into the larger Galleria di Testa in the 1950s and from the connection of the side doors of the building towards two well distinct parts of the city that would later regenerate in different times and ways, along via Sacchi and along via Nizza.
We were then amazed by the Sala Gonin and the Sala degli Stemmi, very notable artistic spaces, which will be usable once more during the planned continuation of the requalification operations in the near future.
PLACES OF TRANSIT AND SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY
We had not forgotten, however, that a Station is an architectural typology, and it is, regardless of its cultural values, most of all a theater animated by motivations and emotions of traveling of a society destined to perennial mutation: once the point of arrival and departure of migrations of entire generations, today a hub of sustainable mobility, a mission led by Grandi Stazioni Retail, made even more relevant by the recent pandemic events.
FLOWS AND CUSTOMER JOURNEY
The element which constituted a second, further phase of investigation very important for the development of the project, is something that concerns the quality of urban relations: a careful qualitative and quantitative study of the flows had in fact highlighted areas of the Station that were empty or underused which had generated in the long run its decline and some trivialization, both cultural and commercial.
This phase could therefore be summarized as an infinite series of outlines, diagrams and sketches aimed at identifying the true goal of the project: the improvement of the so-called Customer Journeys of the various types of users, whether they were Tourists, Business travelers, Commuters, Occasional travelers or simple citizens:
a great deal of attention devoted to the flow of common customers and how they organize their journey as passengers.
HOSPITALITY-INFUSED RETAIL
The space of the Terrazzo Food Lounge is dedicated to these people, with the sincere desire to instill concepts of hospitality and experience in a comfortable and pleasant way, in an architecture both historic and contemporary at the same time.
LIGHTS, MATERIALS, SHAPES, SPACES:
LIGHTING AND WAYFINDING
The choices of a very careful and sophisticated lighting design, and Wayfinding strategies aimed not so much at arranging signals, as much as to offer the right orientation, between information and navigation, to allow users to select their route mode, are aimed at the enhancement and vision of this goal
Over the years we have learned that the key to good Wayfinding lies in an understandable infrastructure. Easy routes, recognizable entrances and an understandable organization of spaces can provide a "natural" Wayfinding, more important than any signage, however beautiful it may be.
Basically a project based on the commitment to work hard to ensure that lights, materials, shapes and spaces could speak for themselves in architecture.
A project that pursues, even in the choices of accessibility and vertical communication between spaces, standards aimed at the best possible quality of clarity and coherence in making the contents of a space evident and attractive despite the complexity of its transit and commercial routes.
THE COMMERCIAL SCENE
IN HARMONY WITH SPACE
A further observation concerns the choices of the windows and signs of the Tenants present in the commercial spaces: a long work of harmonic integration with the architectural elements of the monumental space, drawing on and reinterpreting decorative elements of Turin's urban landscapes and its arcades.
The numerous so-called "flag" signs refer to these, for an immediate reading of the spaces by travelers in transit, and the reduction of the profiles of the window frames for an enhancement of commercial proposals.
Even the internal and external common spaces are influenced by the quality of the architecture and the selection of seating and furnishing elements pursues the intention of creating a stylistic harmony able to enhance the entire context and to make the transit and the stop of the traveler comfortable.
A URBAN FACT
The enhancement project is only in its first, albeit main, significant phase, but like any urban event, the Station claims the need for continuous sustainable adaptation actions to suit the needs of an evolving society.
The wonderful teamwork that Grandi Stazioni Retail has inspired and led up to here has been an opportunity to reconfirm that perhaps, yes, Giuseppe Culicchia was right: the city in its best expressions is a home and we have the task of recognizing it and making it a project accessible to all.
